Protecting Explainable AI Innovations In Health Care

Health care innovators are developing artificial intelligence algorithms called Explainable AI (XAI) that actually reveal the logic behind their diagnoses. Because their results can be verified, doctors and regulators will be more likely to adopt these algorithms than traditional "black box" AI. However, the transparency that makes these algorithms valuable to practitioners also makes the technology trickier to protect as intellectual property. With some legal creativity, there are multiple paths to patent protection for XAI-based diagnostics. The very nature of XAI algorithms prevents them from being kept secret, and the law governing patents for diagnostic algorithms is nearly undecipherable.