Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract

Understanding the aspects of progression for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and treatment is key to building reliable clinical decision-support systems. To promote system trust, one step is to make the machine learning models (used by the decision support systems) explainable for clinicians, developers, and researchers. Recently, working with longitudinal clinical trajectories using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has attracted attention among machine learning researchers. Although GNNs are seen as black-box methods, promising explainable AI (XAI) methods for GNNs have lately been proposed. In this paper, which describes initial project stages, we aim at utilizing GNNs for modeling, predicting, and exploring the model explainability of the low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level in long-term atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease progression and treatment.