Investigating Explainable Artificial Intelligence for MRI-based Classification of Dementia: a New Stability Criterion for Explainable Methods

Individuals diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) have shown an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). As such, early identification of dementia represents a key prognostic element, though hampered by complex disease patterns. Increasing efforts have focused on Machine Learning (ML) to build accurate classification models relying on a multitude of clinical/imaging variables. However, ML itself does not provide sensible explanations related to the model mechanism and feature contribution. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) represents the enabling technology in this framework, allowing to understand ML outcomes and derive human-understandable explanations. In this study, we aimed at exploring ML combined with MRI-based features and XAI to solve this classification problem and interpret the outcome. In particular, we propose a new method to assess the robustness of feature rankings provided by XAI methods, especially when multicollinearity exists. Our findings indicate that our method was able to disentangle the list of the informative features underlying dementia, with important implications for aiding personalized monitoring plans.