Explainable and Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Based on Neural-Symbolic Learning
This work addresses the need for interpretable AI in medical diagnostics, specifically for diabetic retinopathy, though it appears incremental by combining existing neural and symbolic approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of diabetic retinopathy classification by proposing a neural-symbolic learning model that incorporates human-readable symbolic representations for explainability, achieving promising performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the IDRiD dataset.
In this paper, we propose an explainable and interpretable diabetic retinopathy (ExplainDR) classification model based on neural-symbolic learning. To gain explainability, a highlevel symbolic representation should be considered in decision making. Specifically, we introduce a human-readable symbolic representation, which follows a taxonomy style of diabetic retinopathy characteristics related to eye health conditions to achieve explainability. We then include humanreadable features obtained from the symbolic representation in the disease prediction. Experimental results on a diabetic retinopathy classification dataset show that our proposed ExplainDR method exhibits promising performance when compared to that from state-of-the-art methods applied to the IDRiD dataset, while also providing interpretability and explainability.