The unprecedented growth of computational capabilities in recent years has allowed Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to be developed for medical applications with remarkable results. However, a large number of Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) methods powered by AI have limited acceptance and adoption in the medical domain due to the typical blackbox nature of these AI models. Therefore, to facilitate the adoption of these AI models among the medical practitioners, the models' predictions must be explainable and interpretable. The emerging field of explainable AI (XAI) aims to justify the trustworthiness of these models' predictions. This work presents a systematic review of the literature reporting Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection using XAI that were communicated during the last decade. Research questions were carefully formulated to categorise AI models into different conceptual approaches (e.g., Post-hoc, Ante-hoc, Model-Agnostic, Model-Specific, Global, Local etc.) and frameworks (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation or LIME, SHapley Additive exPlanations or SHAP, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping or GradCAM, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation or LRP, etc.) of XAI. This categorisation provides broad coverage of the interpretation spectrum from intrinsic (e.g., Model-Specific, Ante-hoc models) to complex patterns (e.g., Model-Agnostic, Post-hoc models) and by taking local explanations to a global scope. Additionally, different forms of interpretations providing in-depth insight into the factors that support the clinical diagnosis of AD are also discussed. Finally, limitations, needs and open challenges of XAI research are outlined with possible prospects of their usage in AD detection.
5 April 2024 in International Journal of Neural Systems
The robustness of a typical Handwritten character recognition system relies on the availability of comprehensive supervised data samples. There has been considerable work reported in the literature about creating the database for several Indic scripts, but the Tamil script has only one standardized database up to date. This paper presents the work done to create an exhaustive and extensive unconstrained Tamil Handwritten Character Database (uTHCD). The samples were generated from around 850 native Tamil volunteers including school-going kids, homemakers, university students, and faculty. The database consists of about 91000 samples with nearly 600 samples in each of 156 classes. This isolated character database is made publicly available as raw images and Hierarchical Data File (HDF) compressed file. The paper also presents several possible use cases of the proposed uTHCD database using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify handwritten Tamil characters. Several experiments demonstrate that training on the proposed database helps traditional and contemporary classifiers perform on par or better than the existing dataset when tested with unseen data. With this database, we expect to set a new benchmark in Tamil handwritten character recognition and serve as a launchpad for developing robust language technologies for the Tamil script.