On the Suitability of B-cos Networks for the Medical Domain

In fields that rely on high-stakes decisions, such as medicine, interpretability plays a key role in promoting trust and facilitating the adoption of deep learning models by the clinical communities. In the medical image analysis domain, gradient-based class activation maps are the most widely used explanation methods and the field lacks a more in depth investigation into inherently interpretable models that focus on integrating knowledge that ensures the model is learning the correct rules. A new approach, B-cos networks, for increasing the interpretability of deep neural networks by inducing weight-input alignment during training showed promising results on natural image classification. In this work, we study the suitability of these B-cos networks to the medical domain by testing them on different use cases (skin lesions, diabetic retinopathy, cervical cytology, and chest X-rays) and conducting a thorough evaluation of several explanation quality assessment metrics. We find that, just like in natural image classification, B-cos explanations yield more localised maps, but it is not clear that they are better than other methods’ explanations when considering more explanation properties.