The combination of medical imaging and deep learning has significantly improved diagnostic and prognostic capabilities in the healthcare domain. Nevertheless, the inherent complexity of deep learning models poses challenges in understanding their decision-making processes. Interpretability and visualization techniques have emerged as crucial tools to unravel the black-box nature of these models, providing insights into their inner workings and enhancing trust in their predictions. This survey paper comprehensively examines various interpretation and visualization techniques applied to deep learning models in medical imaging. The paper reviews methodologies, discusses their applications, and evaluates their effectiveness in enhancing the interpretability, reliability, and clinical relevance of deep learning models in medical image analysis.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge retrieval to improve factual consistency and reduce hallucinations. Despite growing interest, its use in healthcare remains fragmented. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following PRISMA guidelines, synthesizing 30 peer-reviewed studies on RAG in clinical domains, focusing on three of its most prevalent and promising applications in diagnostic support, electronic health record (EHR) summarization, and medical question answering. We synthesize the existing architectural variants (naïve, advanced, and modular) and examine their deployment across these applications. Persistent challenges are identified, including retrieval noise (irrelevant or low-quality retrieved information), domain shift (performance degradation when models are applied to data distributions different from their training set), generation latency, and limited explainability. Evaluation strategies are compared using both standard metrics and clinical-specific metrics, FactScore, RadGraph-F1, and MED-F1, which are particularly critical for ensuring factual accuracy, medical validity, and clinical relevance. This synthesis offers a domain-focused perspective to guide researchers, healthcare providers, and policymakers in developing reliable, interpretable, and clinically aligned AI systems, laying the groundwork for future innovation in RAG-based healthcare solutions.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a large language model (LLM) that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) to generate human-like responses. This paper provides a broad, systematic review of ChatGPT’s applications in healthcare, particularly in enhancing patient engagement through medical history collection, symptom assessment, and decision support for improved diagnostic accuracy. It assesses ChatGPT’s potential across multiple organ systems and specialties, highlighting its value in clinical, educational, and administrative contexts. This analysis reveals both the benefits and limitations of ChatGPT, including health literacy promotion and support for clinical decision-making, alongside challenges such as the risk of inaccuracies, ethical considerations around informed consent, and regulatory hurdles. A quantified summary of key findings shows ChatGPT’s promise in various applications while underscoring the risks associated with its integration in medical practice. Through this comprehensive approach, this review aims to provide healthcare professionals, researchers, and policymakers with a balanced view of ChatGPT’s potential and limitations, emphasizing the need for ongoing updates to keep pace with evolving medical knowledge.

XAI (eXplainable AI) has become a pivotal area of research with the advancement of deep learning (DL) technologies and applications. Post-hoc explanation methods interpret deep learning predictions by uncovering the significance of input features, while visualization tools can contribute to a deep understanding of AI model reasoning based on these methods. In this paper, we survey a broad spectrum of post-hoc explanation methods and the visual analytics work based on them. First, we categorize the computational methods into four main types: perturbation-based, gradient-based, decomposition-based, and concept-based. While the first three focus on attributing the model’s output to specific regions of the input image, concept-based methods provide global explanations by mapping human-understandable concepts to high-level features. Then, we examine the methodologies, features, strengths, and limitations of each approach. Moreover, we review existing visualization-focused work based on these computational methods. Finally, we discuss further research challenges and opportunities for XAI visualization with post-hoc explanation.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge retrieval to improve factual consistency and reduce hallucinations. Despite growing interest, its use in healthcare remains fragmented. This review fills that gap through an analysis of 30 peer-reviewed studies on RAG in clinical domains, focusing on three of its most prevalent and promising applications in diagnostic support, electronic health record (EHR) summarization, and medical question answering. We synthesize existing architectural variants (naïve, advanced, and modular) and examine their deployment across these applications. Persistent challenges are identified, including retrieval noise (irrelevant or low-quality retrieved information), domain shift (performance degradation when models are applied to data distributions different from their training set), generation latency, and limited explainability. Evaluation strategies are compared using both standard metrics and clinical-specific metrics, FactScore, RadGraph-F1, and MED-F1, which are particularly critical for ensuring factual accuracy, medical validity, and clinical relevance. This synthesis offers a domain-focused perspective to guide researchers, healthcare providers, and policymakers in developing reliable, interpretable, and clinically aligned AI systems, laying the groundwork for future innovation in RAG-based healthcare solutions.