Explainable AI for Medical Images

Most of what goes by the name of Artificial Intelligence (AI) today is actually based on training and deploying Deep Learning (DL) models. Despite their impressive achievements in fields as diverse as image classification, language translation, complex games (such as Go and chess), speech recognition, and self-driving vehicles, DL models are inherently opaque and unable to explain their predictions, decisions, and actions. This is not a critical issue for several applications (such as movie recommendation systems or news/social media feed customization, for example) where the end user will evaluate the quality of the AI based on the results it produces, make occasional adjustments to help it improve future results (e.g., by rating additional movies), or move away from that product/app. There is rarely a need to require an explanation for the AI's decisions when there is very little at stake. However, for high-stakes situations and mission-critical applications – such as self-driving vehicles, criminal justice decisions, financial systems, and healthcare applications – explainability might be considered crucial.