An Explainable Tool to Support Age-related Macular Degeneration Diagnosis

Artificial intelligence and deep learning, in particu-lar, have gained large attention in the ophthalmology community due to the possibility of processing large amounts of data and dig-itized ocular images. Intelligent systems are developed to support the diagnosis and treatment of a number of ophthalmic diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma and retinopathy of prematurity. Hence, explainability is necessary to gain trust and therefore the adoption of these critical decision support systems. Visual explanations have been proposed for AMD diagnosis only when optical coherence tomography (OCT) images are used, but interpretability using other inputs (i.e. data point-based features) for AMD diagnosis is rather limited. In this paper, we propose a practical tool to support AMD diagnosis based on Artificial Hydrocarbon Networks (AHN) with different kinds of input data such as demographic characteristics, features known as risk factors for AMD, and genetic variants obtained from DNA genotyping. The proposed explainer, namely eXplainable Artificial Hydrocarbon Networks (XAHN) is able to get global and local interpretations of the AHN model. An explainability assessment of the XAHN explainer was applied to clinicians for getting feedback from the tool. We consider the XAHN explainer tool will be beneficial to support expert clinicians in AMD diagnosis, especially where input data are not visual.