Looking deeper into interpretable deep learning in neuroimaging: a
  comprehensive survey
Md. Mahfuzur Rahman Vince D. Calhoun Sergey M. Plis
Deep learning (DL) models have been popular due to their ability to learn
directly from the raw data in an end-to-end paradigm, alleviating the concern
of a separate error-prone feature extraction phase. Recent DL-based
neuroimaging studies have also witnessed a noticeable performance advancement
over traditional machine learning algorithms. But the challenges of deep
learning models still exist because of the lack of transparency in these models
for their successful deployment in real-world applications. In recent years,
Explainable AI (XAI) has undergone a surge of developments mainly to get
intuitions of how the models reached the decisions, which is essential for
safety-critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and law enforcement
agencies. While the interpretability domain is advancing noticeably,
researchers are still unclear about what aspect of model learning a post hoc
method reveals and how to validate its reliability. This paper comprehensively
reviews interpretable deep learning models in the neuroimaging domain. Firstly,
we summarize the current status of interpretability resources in general,
focusing on the progression of methods, associated challenges, and opinions.
Secondly, we discuss how multiple recent neuroimaging studies leveraged model
interpretability to capture anatomical and functional brain alterations most
relevant to model predictions. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the
current practices and offer some valuable insights and guidance on how we can
steer our future research directions to make deep learning models substantially
interpretable and thus advance scientific understanding of brain disorders.