Cited by 629Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationMachine Learning in Healthcare

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 133 of the 133 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 163 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Current Challenges and Future Opportunities for XAI in Machine Learning-Based Clinical Decision Support Systems: A Systematic Review

Open access

Abstract

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) more broadly have great immediate and future potential for transforming almost all aspects of medicine. However, in many applications, even outside medicine, a lack of transparency in AI applications has become increasingly problematic. This is particularly pronounced where users need to interpret the output of AI systems. Explainable AI (XAI) provides a rationale that allows users to understand why a system has produced a given output. The output can then be interpreted within a given context. One area that is in great need of XAI is that of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs). These systems support medical practitioners in their clinic decision-making and in the absence of explainability may lead to issues of under or over-reliance. Providing explanations for how recommendations are arrived at will allow practitioners to make more nuanced, and in some cases, life-saving decisions. The need for XAI in CDSS, and the medical field in general, is amplified by the need for ethical and fair decision-making and the fact that AI trained with historical data can be a reinforcement agent of historical actions and biases that should be uncovered. We performed a systematic literature review of work to-date in the application of XAI in CDSS. Tabular data processing XAI-enabled systems are the most common, while XAI-enabled CDSS for text analysis are the least common in literature. There is more interest in developers for the provision of local explanations, while there was almost a balance between post-hoc and ante-hoc explanations, as well as between model-specific and model-agnostic techniques. Studies reported benefits of the use of XAI such as the fact that it could enhance decision confidence for clinicians, or generate the hypothesis about causality, which ultimately leads to increased trustworthiness and acceptability of the system and potential for its incorporation in the clinical workflow. However, we found an overall distinct lack of application of XAI in the context of CDSS and, in particular, a lack of user studies exploring the needs of clinicians. We propose some guidelines for the implementation of XAI in CDSS and explore some opportunities, challenges, and future research needs.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This systematic review maps explainable AI (XAI) in machine-learning-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS), finding 12 implemented XAI-CDSS among 33 included papers and a dominance of tabular data, local explanations, and limited clinician user studies. It reports benefits such as enhanced decision confidence and trust but concludes there is a distinct lack of XAI application in CDSS and of user studies exploring clinician needs.

Key findings

  • Of 33 included papers, 12 (36.4%) described CDSS with XAI, 8 (24.2%) were literature reviews, 9 (27.3%) discussed aspects of XAI in CDSS, and 4 (12.1%) implemented CDSS without XAI. Publication years were 1 in 2008, 3 in 2018, 13 in 2019, and 16 in 2020 up to 24 July.
  • XAI-enabled CDSS for tabular data were most common, while XAI-enabled CDSS for text analysis were least common. Local explanations were most common; the abstract reports almost a balance between post-hoc and ante-hoc explanations and between model-specific and model-agnostic techniques.
  • Reported benefits include enhanced decision confidence for clinicians, generation of hypotheses about causality, increased trustworthiness and acceptability, and potential incorporation into clinical workflow. User studies cited include 20 participants (Liao et al.), 39 referring physicians and 38 radiologists (Xie et al.), 21 pathologists (Cai et al.), and 11 medical experts (Lamy et al.).
  • Challenges include no universal definition of explainability, lack of validated and reliable evaluation metrics, lack of user studies for some XAI-based approaches, and little discussion of XAI’s impact on patients from the patient perspective.

Methods

  • Systematic literature review adapting Kitchenham guidelines. Six Google Scholar searches on 24 July 2020 (S1–S6) returned 668 total and 261 unique publications.
  • Screening removed non-peer-reviewed and non-English papers, out-of-scope papers, and applied quality filters (ACM/IEEE, CORE 2020, JCR 2018, etc.), leaving 72 papers. Three author pairs independently classified include/exclude based on XAI or explainability in relation to CDSS, with 68% agreement and reconciliation, yielding 33 papers.
  • Data were extracted and synthesized; CDSS were classified by XAI method categories: post-hoc/ante-hoc, model-specific/model-agnostic, and local/global explanations, addressing four research questions.

Limitations

  • Stated: lack of user studies for some XAI-based approaches; need to confirm results on a larger user study; no consensus on evaluating interpretability, explanation correctness, or benchmarking methods; few studies on clinician needs and little discussion of patient perspective; overall lack of research.
  • Stated: search was limited to Google Scholar on 24 July 2020, English-only, peer-reviewed conference/journal papers with quality filters; final set was 33 papers, only 12 of which described XAI-CDSS.
  • Evident from the text: reliance on a single database and single search date may miss relevant work; the small final sample and heterogeneous systems limit generalizability; no meta-analysis was performed.

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

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3390/app11115088

Cites

133 of 133 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 of 163 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged

Show all 53 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 76
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 78
115 of 115
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    CDSS in the absence of explainability may lead to issues of under- or overreliance.

    “These systems support medical practitioners in their clinic decision-making and in the absence of explainability may lead to issues of under or overreliance.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Humans are more tolerant towards human error than machine error.

    “There is an overall perception that humans are more tolerant towards human error than machine error, and Prahl and Van Swol [44] found that decision-makers considered human advisers to be more expert and useful, while they showed more negative emotions when a human advisor was replaced by a machine.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    Explainable CDSS will build trust with clinicians leading to increased adoption of ML-based systems in clinical practice.

    “Ultimately, it is presumed that explainable CDSS will build trust with clinicians leading to increased adoption of ML-based systems in clinical practice [12,21,69,139].”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Medical experts struggle with the gap between what is output by an ML-based solution and human explanations.

    “However, medical experts struggle with the gap between what is output by an ML-based solution and human explanations.”
4 of 4

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.

  • Lamy et al. [126] is classified as both image-based and tabular

    Minor

    The discussion includes study [126] among image-based CDSS, but the paper's study listing labels its data as tabular.

  • Van Lent citation points to a different reference

    Minor

    The text cites [45] for Van Lent et al.'s 2004 work, but reference 45 is a paper by Richard et al. The Van Lent work appears elsewhere in the reference list.

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Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 121 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Mooney, 2017, Artificial Intelligence in Education: What is it, Where is it Now, Where is it Going?, Ireland’s Yearbook of Education 2017–2018, Volume 1, 42
  2. (2021, April 25). ClinicalPath. Available online: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/clinicalpath.
  3. Angwin, 2016, Machine bias, ProPublica May, 23, 139
  4. Richardson, 2019, Dirty data, bad predictions: How civil rights violations impact police data, predictive policing systems, and justice, NYUL Rev. Online, 94, 15
  5. Ifeoma, A. (2020, July 24). The Auditing Imperative for Automated Hiring (15 March 2019). 34 Harv. J.L. & Tech. (forthcoming 2021). Available online: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3437631.
  6. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Penguin Random House.
  7. Aïvodji, U., Arai, H., Fortineau, O., Gambs, S., Hara, S., and Tapp, A. (2019, January 9–15). Fairwashing: The risk of rationalization. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR, Long Beach, CA, USA.
  8. Monteath, I., and Sheh, R. (2018, January 13–19). Assisted and incremental medical diagnosis using explainable artificial intelligence. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Stockholm, Sweden.

Cited by

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Items 201–300 of 628

Metadata

Authors
Antoniadi, A. M., Du, Y., Guendouz, Y., Wei, L., Mazo, C., Becker, B. A., & Mooney, C.
Affiliations
  • University College Dublin (IE)
  • Trinity College Dublin (IE)
Corresponding author
Mooney, Catherine
Venue
Applied Sciences
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2021-05-31
Volume
11
Issue
11
Pages
5088
ISSN
2076-3417 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3172362366
Cited by
629
References
121
Citations by year
2026: 108 · 2025: 165 · 2024: 171 · 2023: 116 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 10
FWCI
6.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Applied Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
  • Science Foundation Ireland (16/RC/3948, 18/CRT/6224)
  • Enterprise Ireland (713654)
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, clinical decision support systems, machine learning in medicine, AI transparency, local explanations, post-hoc explanation, model-agnostic explanation, tabular data, text analysis, clinician trust, algorithmic bias, ethical AI

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