Open Access

Ramy ZeineldinORCiD, Oliver BurgertORCiD, Franziska Mathis-Ullrich

• Purpose Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular deep learning (DL), has achieved remarkable results for medical image analysis in several applications. Yet the lack of human-like explanations of such systems is considered the principal restriction before utilizing these methods in clinical practice (Yang, Ye, & Xia, 2022). Methods Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) provides a human-explainable and interpretable description of the “black-box” nature of DL (Gulum, Trombley, & Kantardzic, 2021). An effective XAI diagnosis generator, namely NeuroXAI (refer to Fig. 1), has been developed to extract 3D explanations from convolutional neural networks (CNN) models of brain gliomas (Zeineldin et al., 2022). By providing visual justification maps, NeuroXAI can help make DL models transparent and thus increase the trust of medical experts. Results NeuroXAI has been applied to two applications of the most widely investigated problems in brain imaging analysis, i.e. image classification and segmentation using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Visual attention maps of multiple XAI methods have been generated and compared for both applications, which could help to provide transparency about the performance of DL systems. Conclusion NeuroXAI helps to understand the prediction process of 3D CNN networks for brain glioma using human-understandable explanations. Results revealed that the investigated DL models behave in a logical human-like manner and can improve the analytical process of the MRI images systematically. Due to its open architecture, ease of implementation, and scalability to new XAI methods, NeuroXAI could be utilized to assist medical professionals in the detection and diagnosis of brain tumors. NeuroXAI code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/razeineldin/NeuroXAI