Beyond Known Reality: Exploiting Counterfactual Explanations for Medical Research
This addresses the problem of clinician acceptance of AI in medical research, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing explainability technique to a specific domain.
The study tackled the lack of human-friendly explanations in AI for medical research by applying counterfactual explanations to MRI-based diagnosis of pediatric brain tumors, demonstrating promising potential to improve AI-driven clinical methods.
The field of explainability in artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed a growing number of studies and increasing scholarly interest. However, the lack of human-friendly and individual interpretations in explaining the outcomes of machine learning algorithms has significantly hindered the acceptance of these methods by clinicians in their research and clinical practice. To address this issue, our study uses counterfactual explanations to explore the applicability of "what if?" scenarios in medical research. Our aim is to expand our understanding of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features used for diagnosing pediatric posterior fossa brain tumors beyond existing boundaries. In our case study, the proposed concept provides a novel way to examine alternative decision-making scenarios that offer personalized and context-specific insights, enabling the validation of predictions and clarification of variations under diverse circumstances. Additionally, we explore the potential use of counterfactuals for data augmentation and evaluate their feasibility as an alternative approach in our medical research case. The results demonstrate the promising potential of using counterfactual explanations to improve AI-driven methods in clinical research.