Medical Informatics in a Tension between Black-Box AI and Trust

Abstract

For medical informaticians, it became more and more crucial to assess the benefits and disadvantages of AI-based solutions as promising alternatives for many traditional tools. Besides quantitative criteria such as accuracy and processing time, healthcare providers are often interested in qualitative explanations of the solutions. Explainable AI provides methods and tools, which are interpretable enough that it affords different stakeholders a qualitative understanding of its solutions. Its main purpose is to provide insights into the black-box mechanism of machine learning programs. Our goal here is to advance the problem of qualitatively assessing AI from the perspective of medical informaticians by providing insights into the central notions, namely: explainability, interpretability, understanding, trust, and confidence.