Artificial intelligence and deep learning are powerful tools for extracting knowledge from large datasets, particularly in healthcare. However, their black-box nature raises interpretability concerns, especially in high-stakes applications. Existing eXplainable Artificial Intelligence methods often focus solely on visualization or rule-based explanations, limiting interpretability's depth and clarity. This work proposes a novel explainable AI method specifically designed for medical image analysis, integrating statistical, visual, and rule-based explanations to improve transparency in deep learning models. Statistical features are derived from deep features extracted using a custom Mobilenetv2 model. A two-step feature selection method - zero-based filtering with mutual importance selection - ranks and refines these features. Decision tree and RuleFit models are employed to classify data and extract human-readable rules. Additionally, a novel statistical feature map overlay visualization generates heatmap-like representations of three key statistical measures (mean, skewness, and entropy), providing both localized and quantifiable visual explanations of model decisions. The proposed method has been validated on five medical imaging datasets - COVID-19 radiography, ultrasound breast cancer, brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging, lung and colon cancer histopathological, and glaucoma images - with results confirmed by medical experts, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing interpretability for medical image classification tasks.

There is an urgent need in many application areas for eXplainable ArtificiaI Intelligence (XAI) approaches to boost people’s confidence and trust in Artificial Intelligence methods. Current works concentrate on specific aspects of XAI and avoid a comprehensive perspective. This study undertakes a systematic survey of importance, approaches, methods, and application domains to address this gap and provide a comprehensive understanding of the XAI domain. Applying the Systematic Literature Review approach has resulted in finding and discussing 155 papers, allowing a wide discussion on the strengths, limitations, and challenges of XAI methods and future research directions.

Effective and transparent medical diagnosis relies on accurate and interpretable classification of medical images across multiple modalities. This paper introduces an explainable multi-modal image analysis framework based on a dual-stream architecture that fuses handcrafted descriptors with deep features extracted from a custom MobileNet. Handcrafted descriptors include frequency-domain and texture features, while deep features are summarized using 26 statistical metrics to enhance interpretability. In the fusion stage, complementary features are combined at both the feature and decision levels. Decision-level integration combines calibrated soft voting, weighted voting, and stacking ensembles with optimized classifiers, including decision trees, random forests, gradient boosting, and logistic regression. To further refine performance, a hybrid class-specific feature selection strategy is proposed, combining mutual information, recursive elimination, and random forest importance to select the most discriminative features for each class. This hybrid selection approach eliminates redundancy, improves computational efficiency, and ensures robust classification. Explainability is provided through Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations, which offer transparent details about the ensemble model’s predictions and link influential handcrafted features to clinically meaningful image characteristics. The framework is validated on three benchmark datasets, i.e., BTTypes (brain MRI), Ultrasound Breast Images, and ACRIMA Retinal Fundus Images, demonstrating generalizability across modalities (MRI, ultrasound, retinal fundus) and disease categories (brain tumor, breast cancer, glaucoma).

Early and accurate detection of lemon disease is necessary for effective citrus crop management. Traditional approaches often lack refined diagnosis, necessitating more powerful solutions. The article introduces adaptive PSO-LemonNetX, a novel framework integrating a novel deep learning model, adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based feature selection, and explainable AI (XAI) using LIME. The approach improves the accuracy of classification while also enhancing the explainability of the model. Our end-to-end model obtained 97.01% testing and 98.55% validation accuracy. Performance was enhanced further with adaptive PSO and conventional classifiers—100% validation accuracy using Naive Bayes and 98.8% testing accuracy using Naive Bayes and an SVM. The suggested PSO-based feature selection performed better than ReliefF, Kruskal–Wallis, and Chi-squared approaches. Due to its lightweight design and good performance, this approach can be adapted for edge devices in IoT-enabled smart farms, contributing to sustainable and automated disease detection systems. These results show the potential of integrating deep learning, PSO, grid search, and XAI into smart agriculture workflows for enhancing agricultural disease detection and decision-making.

Vision-based pantograph wear recognition plays a critical role in the safety and reliability of railway power supply systems. Although recent studies report promising deep learning-based results, these models solely depend on the integrity of the dataset. Data integrity is a critical yet often overlooked factor in research and production, and neglecting it may lead to inconsistencies and compromised operational safety. In the proposed approach, we demonstrate that a widely used pantograph wear dataset contains severe redundancy and label inconsistencies, including duplicate images appearing within classes and across different wear categories. These issues undermine supervised learning, reduce model generalisation, compromise predictive reliability, and may weaken the safety of rail infrastructure systems. This work (i) preprocesses the dataset by employing MD5-based cryptographic hashing and manual verification, where 626 redundant samples were identified from a dataset of 909 images; subsequently, a manual relabelling procedure is used to correct inherited annotation errors and consistent class definitions. (ii) It devises a Dual-Backbone Feature Fusion Ensemble Network (DBFF-Net) for small and challenging datasets by integrating frozen ShuffleNetV2 and DeiT-tiny as the best individual performing classifiers using various fusion strategies, including concat, weighted sum, Bilinear, Cross-Attention, and Gated. Amongst the different fusion approaches, we obtain the best results with the Gated approach. We reproduced the comparatively improved pantograph wear classification results and conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate that dataset sanitization improves the stability and reproducibility of the model. Moreover, it has been shown that DBFF-Net outperforms individually employed pretrained CNNs and transformer models and achieves an accuracy of 96.46% even with limited but sanitised data.