Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in medical imaging: a systematic review of techniques, applications, and challenges

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is crucial for enhancing transparency and trustworthiness, as well as for developing AI-based diagnostic systems in medical imaging to achieve clinical acceptability and reliability. This synthesis aligns with the current context of XAI in medical imaging on four key dimensions: trends in techniques, their application to clinical use cases or with human subjects, and the associated problems. In radiology and pathology, we report on image analysis based on current literature from credible databases. This review extends on the existing surveys by explicitly addressing the focus on feature selection (FS), graph neural networks (GNNs), and multimodal transformers and…