Cited by 305Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationMachine Learning in Healthcare

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 72 of the 78 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 20 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts and Challenges in Healthcare

Open access
Hulsen, Tim·2023·AI

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) describes computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. Examples of AI techniques are machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning. AI can be applied in many different areas, such as econometrics, biometry, e-commerce, and the automotive industry. In recent years, AI has found its way into healthcare as well, helping doctors make better decisions (“clinical decision support”), localizing tumors in magnetic resonance images, reading and analyzing reports written by radiologists and pathologists, and much more. However, AI has one big risk: it can be perceived as a “black box”, limiting trust in its reliability, which is a very big issue in an area in which a decision can mean life or death. As a result, the term Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has been gaining momentum. XAI tries to ensure that AI algorithms (and the resulting decisions) can be understood by humans. In this narrative review, we will have a look at some central concepts in XAI, describe several challenges around XAI in healthcare, and discuss whether it can really help healthcare to advance, for example, by increasing understanding and trust. Finally, alternatives to increase trust in AI are discussed, as well as future research possibilities in the area of XAI.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This narrative review surveys the current status of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in healthcare, covering the "black box" trust problem, legal/regulatory drivers, transparent versus post-hoc explainability, privacy and security trade-offs, and the tension between explainability and accuracy. The author argues that in healthcare accuracy may outweigh explainability, and that trust might better be built through robustness, fairness, reproducibility, and human–AI collaboration than through explanation alone.

Key findings

  • XAI is growing rapidly in the literature: the first mention of "explainable artificial intelligence" in a PubMed title, abstract or keyword was in 2018, and it has since been mentioned 511 times, of which more than half (310) appeared in 2022 or the first months of 2023; Embase shows a similar trend (queries performed 2023-03-06).
  • Explainability and accuracy can trade off: making a model fully transparent (a "glass box") may require simplification that reduces the accuracy of a highly predictive model (a "crystal ball"). Van der Veer et al. concluded citizens may value explainability in healthcare less than in non-healthcare domains and less than professionals assume, especially weighed against accuracy.
  • XAI is double-edged for privacy and security: it can help detect errors and malicious behavior, but explanations may reveal sensitive information or enable manipulation via reverse engineering. Saifullah et al. recommend differential private federated learning plus perturbation-based XAI methods when both privacy and explainability are required.
  • Explanations do not automatically produce trust: Le Merrer and Trédan show remote explainability cannot prevent a service provider from lying about the true reasons for its decisions, while Druce et al. found a statistically significant increase in user trust and acceptance using a three-fold explanation.

Methods

  • Design: narrative review of XAI concepts, issues, and challenges in healthcare, with no systematic review protocol described.
  • Data: no new data were created or analyzed; the paper draws on cited literature and a bibliometric query of PubMed and Embase for the term "explainable artificial intelligence" in titles, abstracts and keywords, performed on 2023-03-06.
  • Analysis: thematic discussion organized into sections covering transparency, legal/regulatory compliance (GDPR, the EU AI Act, HIPAA, PIPL), transparent vs. post-hoc explainability, privacy/security, human–AI collaboration, trust, scientific XAI (sXAI), the explainability–accuracy balance, measurement of explainability, and future complexity.

Limitations

  • The paper states no formal limitations section; it is explicitly a narrative review, and the text notes that explainability is difficult to measure because "the quality of an explanation is somewhat subjective."
  • Evident from the text: the review is a non-systematic narrative synthesis by a single author, so selection of cited work is not governed by a documented search protocol.
  • Evident from the text: the version provided is a preprint (preprints.org, posted 7 March 2023) marked "NOT PEER-REVIEWED," and the author is an employee of Philips Research (declared under Acknowledgements).

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3390/ai4030034

Cites

72 of 72 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 of 20 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged

Show all 18 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 11
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 16
21 of 21
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    AI algorithms can be perceived as black boxes, and this limits trust in their reliability, which is a major issue in healthcare where decisions can be life-or-death.

    “However, AI has one big risk: it can be perceived as a 'black box', limiting trust in its reliability, which is a very big issue in an area in which a decision can mean life or death.”
    “They can be perceived as a 'black box': something goes in, and something comes out, with no understanding of what happens inside.”
    “This distrust in AI algorithms, their accuracy and reliability, is a very big issue in an area in which a decision could mean life or death of the patient.”
1 of 1

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Reference 31 gives conflicting conference and publication years

    Minor

    The reference identifies the proceedings as a 2020 conference but gives 2018 as the publication year.

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Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

6 of the 78 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Holzinger, A., Goebel, R., Fong, R., Moon, T., Müller, K.-R., and Samek, W. (2020, January 12–18). Explainable AI methods—A brief overview. Proceedings of the xxAI—Beyond Explainable AI: International Workshop, Held in Conjunction with ICML 2020, Vienna, Austria.
  2. Zadeh, L.A. (1979). Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic, and Fuzzy Systems: Selected Papers, World Scientific.
  3. Mencar, C., and Alonso, J.M. (2018, January 6–7). Paving the way to explainable artificial intelligence with fuzzy modeling: Tutorial. Proceedings of the Fuzzy Logic and Applications: 12th International Workshop (WILF 2018), Genoa, Italy.
  4. Fauvel, K., Masson, V., and Fromont, E. (2020). A performance-explainability framework to benchmark machine learning methods: Application to multivariate time series classifiers. arXiv.
  5. Huynh, T.D., Tsakalakis, N., Helal, A., Stalla-Bourdillon, S., and Moreau, L. (2022). Explainability-by-Design: A Methodology to Support Explanations in Decision-Making Systems. arXiv.
  6. Simonyan, K., Vedaldi, A., and Zisserman, A. (2013). Deep inside convolutional networks: Visualising image classification models and saliency maps. arXiv.
  7. Marcus, G. (2020). The next decade in AI: Four steps towards robust artificial intelligence. arXiv.

Cited by

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Metadata

Authors
Hulsen, T.
Affiliations
Philips (Netherlands) (NL)
Corresponding author
Hulsen, Tim
Venue
AI
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2023-08-10
Volume
4
Issue
3
Pages
652-666
ISSN
2673-2688 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385766743
Cited by
305
References
78
Citations by year
2026: 92 · 2025: 112 · 2024: 85 · 2023: 16
FWCI
26.99
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • AI (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Preprints.org (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
Keywords
explainable AI, artificial intelligence in healthcare, clinical decision support, black box problem, trust in AI, interpretability, medical image analysis, radiology report analysis

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