Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Medical Applications: A Review
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
The continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI) theory has propelled this field to unprecedented heights, owing to the relentless efforts of scholars and researchers. In the medical realm, AI takes a pivotal role, leveraging robust machine learning (ML) algorithms. AI technology in medical imaging aids physicians in X-ray, computed tomography (CT) scans, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diagnoses, conducts pattern recognition and disease prediction based on acoustic data, delivers prognoses on disease types and developmental trends for patients, and employs intelligent health management wearable devices with human-computer interaction technology to name but a few. While these well-established applications have significantly assisted in medical field diagnoses, clinical decision-making, and management, collaboration between the medical and AI sectors faces an urgent challenge: How to substantiate the reliability of decision-making? The underlying issue stems from the conflict between the demand for accountability and result transparency in medical scenarios and the black-box model traits of AI. This article reviews recent research grounded in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), with an emphasis on medical practices within the visual, audio, and multimodal perspectives. We endeavour to categorise and synthesise these practices, aiming to provide support and guidance for future researchers and healthcare professionals.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 53 of its 202 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2024.
Builds on
53 of 202 references.
References · 53
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2016Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localizationcited by 6,690
- 2017A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictionscited by 6,488
- 2016"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifiercited by 5,040
- 2015Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localizationcited by 2,430
- 2013Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Mapscited by 2,348
- 2013Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networkscited by 2,278
- 2019Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AIcited by 1,543
- 2017Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV)cited by 1,309
- 2014Striving for Simplicity: The All Convolutional Netcited by 983
- 2017Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networkscited by 936
- 2016The Mythos of Model Interpretabilitycited by 716
38 more
- 2019Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 575
- 2019A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAIcited by 403
- 2019Is Attention Interpretable?cited by 387
- 2021Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 319
- 2022From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AIcited by 299
- 2018Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospectscited by 257
- 2016Skin Lesion Analysis toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2016, hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)cited by 197
- 2021Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in deep learning-based medical image analysiscited by 147
- 2022From Attribution Maps to Human-Understandable Explanations through Concept Relevance Propagationcited by 141
- 2019Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AIcited by 134
- 2017What do we need to build explainable AI systems for the medical domain?cited by 127
- 2019Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Modelscited by 118
- 2020Explainable deep learning models in medical image analysiscited by 111
- 2020The role of explainability in creating trustworthy artificial intelligence for health care: a comprehensive survey of the terminology, design choices, and evaluation strategiescited by 91
- 2021A Comprehensive Taxonomy for Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Survey of Surveys on Methods and Conceptscited by 90
- 2019AVEC 2019 Workshop and Challenge: State-of-Mind, Detecting Depression with AI, and Cross-Cultural Affect Recognitioncited by 87
- 2020Good Counterfactuals and Where to Find Them: A Case-Based Technique for Generating Counterfactuals for Explainable AI (XAI)cited by 79
- 2020Explainable Artificial Intelligence: a Systematic Reviewcited by 79
- 2019Understanding artificial intelligence ethics and safetycited by 68
- 2020GANterfactual - Counterfactual Explanations for Medical Non-Experts using Generative Adversarial Learningcited by 50
- 2020SS-CAM: Smoothed Score-CAM for Sharper Visual Feature Localizationcited by 46
- 2020Generative causal explanations of black-box classifierscited by 41
- 2020On Interpretability of Deep Learning based Skin Lesion Classifiers using Concept Activation Vectorscited by 39
- 2022Guidelines and Evaluation of Clinical Explainable AI in Medical Image Analysiscited by 34
- 2024Gradient based Feature Attribution in Explainable AI: A Technical Reviewcited by 34
- 2020What Do You See? Evaluation of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Interpretability through Neural Backdoorscited by 32
- 2016Gradients of Counterfactualscited by 31
- 2022ExAID: A Multimodal Explanation Framework for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Skin Lesionscited by 19
- 2020Impact of lung segmentation on the diagnosis and explanation of COVID-19 in chest X-ray imagescited by 14
- 2022Multi-objective optimization determines when, which and how to fuse deep networks: an application to predict COVID-19 outcomescited by 12
- 2024User Characteristics in Explainable AI: The Rabbit Hole of Personalization?cited by 12
- 2022LightX3ECG: A Lightweight and eXplainable Deep Learning System for 3-lead Electrocardiogram Classificationcited by 11
- 2018Recent Progresses in Deep Learning based Acoustic Models (Updated)cited by 8
- 2021XAI Methods for Neural Time Series Classification: A Brief Reviewcited by 7
- 2021Evaluating the COVID-19 Identification ResNet (CIdeR) on the INTERSPEECH COVID-19 from Audio Challengescited by 5
- 2023Integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence in Intelligent Vehicle Systemscited by 5
- 2024Audio-based Kinship Verification Using Age Domain Conversioncited by 3
- 2021Explainability via Interactivity? Supporting Nonexperts' Sensemaking of Pretrained CNN by Interacting with Their Daily Surroundingscited by 2
50 most cited of 53 All 53 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 5; 2026: 6.
12 papers.
- 2025Fleming-R1: Toward Expert-Level Medical Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 9
- 2024Towards Friendly AI: A Comprehensive Review and New Perspectives on Human-AI Alignmentcited by 2
- 2025Pulmonary Tuberculosis Edge Diagnosis System Based on MindSpore Framework: Low-cost and High-precision Implementation with Ascend 310 Chipcited by 0
- 2025On the notion of missingness for path attribution explainability methods in medical settings: Guiding the selection of medically meaningful baselinescited by 0
- 2025Rethinking Explainable Disease Prediction: Synergizing Accuracy and Reliability via Reflective Cognitive Architecturecited by 0
- 2025RAxSS: Retrieval-Augmented Sparse Sampling for Explainable Variable-Length Medical Time Series Classificationcited by 0
- 2026Exploring Trust Calibration in XAI - The Impact of Exposing Model Limitations to Lay Userscited by 0
- 2026XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026KANEx: Translating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks' Interpretability to Medical Explainabilitycited by 0
- 2026Crushing the Evidence: A Dual-Penalty Evasion Framework for Fooling White-Box Explainable AI Auditorscited by 0
- 2026Who Are You Explaining To? A Multi-Agent System for Audience-Aware XAI Narrativescited by 0
- 2026A New Transformer-Based Approach for Audio-Based Kinship Verification and a New Uncontrolled Mandarin Kinship Speech Datasetcited by 0
- 2026A New Transformer-Based Approach for Audio-Based Kinship Verification and a New Uncontrolled Mandarin Kinship Speech Dataset12 Sep 2026
- 2026Who Are You Explaining To? A Multi-Agent System for Audience-Aware XAI Narratives11 Aug 2026
- 2026Crushing the Evidence: A Dual-Penalty Evasion Framework for Fooling White-Box Explainable AI Auditors1 Aug 2026
- 2026KANEx: Translating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks' Interpretability to Medical Explainability27 Jul 2026
- 2026XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models15 Jun 2026
- 2026Exploring Trust Calibration in XAI - The Impact of Exposing Model Limitations to Lay Users18 May 2026
- 2025RAxSS: Retrieval-Augmented Sparse Sampling for Explainable Variable-Length Medical Time Series Classification3 Oct 2025
- 2025Rethinking Explainable Disease Prediction: Synergizing Accuracy and Reliability via Reflective Cognitive Architecture25 Sep 2025
- 2025Fleming-R1: Toward Expert-Level Medical Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning18 Sep 2025
- 2025On the notion of missingness for path attribution explainability methods in medical settings: Guiding the selection of medically meaningful baselines20 Aug 2025
- 2025Pulmonary Tuberculosis Edge Diagnosis System Based on MindSpore Framework: Low-cost and High-precision Implementation with Ascend 310 Chip15 Feb 2025
- 2024Towards Friendly AI: A Comprehensive Review and New Perspectives on Human-AI Alignment19 Dec 2024