A Systematic Map of Interpretability in Medicine

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) has been rapidly growing, mainly owing to the availability of historical datasets and advanced computational power. This growth is still facing a set of challenges, such as the interpretability of ML models. In particular, in the medical field, interpretability is a real bottleneck to the use of ML by physicians. This review was carried out according to the well-known systematic map process to analyse the literature on interpretability techniques when applied in the medical field with regard to different aspects. A total of 179 articles (1994-2020) were selected from six digital libraries. The results showed that the number of studies dealing with interpretability increased over the years with a dominance of solution proposals and experiment-based empirical type. Additionally, artificial neural networks were the most widely used ML black-box techniques investigated for interpretability.