eXplainable AI for trustworthy healthcare applications

Acknowledging that AI will inevitably become a central element of clinical practice, this thesis investigates the role of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques in developing trustworthy AI applications in healthcare. The first part of this thesis focuses on the societal, ethical, and legal aspects of the use of AI in healthcare. It first compares the different approaches to AI ethics worldwide and then focuses on the practical implications of the European ethical and legal guidelines for AI applications in healthcare. The second part of the thesis explores how XAI techniques can help meet three key requirements identified in the initial analysis: transparency, auditability, and human oversight. The technical transparency requirement is tackled by enabling explanatory techniques to deal with common healthcare data characteristics and tailor them to the medical field. In this regard, this thesis presents two novel XAI techniques that incrementally reach this goal by first focusing on multi-label predictive algorithms and then tackling sequential data and incorporating domainspecific knowledge in the explanation process. This thesis then analyzes the ability to leverage the developed XAI technique to audit a fictional commercial black-box clinical decision support system (DSS). Finally, the thesis studies AI explanation’s ability to effectively enable human oversight by studying the impact of explanations on the decision-making process of healthcare professionals.