How Artificial Intelligence Can Explain Its Decisions

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to recognise whether a tissue image contains a tumour. However, exactly how it makes its decision has remained a mystery until now. A team from the Research Center for Protein Diagnostics (PRODI) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum is developing a new approach that will render an AI's decision transparent and thus trustworthy. The researchers led by Professor Axel Mosig describe the approach in the journal Medical Image Analysis. For the study, bioinformatics scientist Axel Mosig cooperated with Professor Andrea Tannapfel, head of the Institute of Pathology, oncologist Professor Anke Reinacher-Schick from the Ruhr-Universität's St. Josef Hospital, and biophysicist and PRODI founding director Professor Klaus Gerwert. The group developed a neural network, i.e. an AI, that can classify whether a tissue sample contains tumour or not.