Explainable AI For COVID-19 CT Classifiers: An Initial Comparison Study
This addresses the need for transparency in AI tools used by clinicians for COVID-19 diagnosis, though it appears incremental as it focuses on comparison and application of existing XAI methods to a specific domain.
The study tackled the problem of understanding how deep learning models classify COVID-19 from CT scans by proposing and developing explainable AI (XAI) strategies, resulting in promising quantification and qualitative visualizations that enhance clinician understanding and decision-making.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made leapfrogs in development across all the industrial sectors especially when deep learning has been introduced. Deep learning helps to learn the behaviour of an entity through methods of recognising and interpreting patterns. Despite its limitless potential, the mystery is how deep learning algorithms make a decision in the first place. Explainable AI (XAI) is the key to unlocking AI and the black-box for deep learning. XAI is an AI model that is programmed to explain its goals, logic, and decision making so that the end users can understand. The end users can be domain experts, regulatory agencies, managers and executive board members, data scientists, users that use AI, with or without awareness, or someone who is affected by the decisions of an AI model. Chest CT has emerged as a valuable tool for the clinical diagnostic and treatment management of the lung diseases associated with COVID-19. AI can support rapid evaluation of CT scans to differentiate COVID-19 findings from other lung diseases. However, how these AI tools or deep learning algorithms reach such a decision and which are the most influential features derived from these neural networks with typically deep layers are not clear. The aim of this study is to propose and develop XAI strategies for COVID-19 classification models with an investigation of comparison. The results demonstrate promising quantification and qualitative visualisations that can further enhance the clinician's understanding and decision making with more granular information from the results given by the learned XAI models.