Explainable, Trustworthy, and Ethical Machine Learning for Healthcare: A Survey

With the advent of machine learning (ML) applications in daily life, the questions about liability, trust, and interpretability of their outputs are raising, especially for healthcare applications. The black-box nature of ML models is a roadblock for clinical utilization. Therefore, to gain the trust of clinicians and patients, researchers need to provide explanations of how and why the model is making a specific decision. With the promise of enhancing the trust and transparency of black-box models, researchers are in the phase of maturing the field of eXplainable ML (XML). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of explainable and interpretable ML techniques implemented for providing the reasons behind their decisions for various healthcare applications. Along with highlighting various security, safety, and robustness challenges that hinder the trustworthiness of ML we also discussed the ethical issues of healthcare ML and describe how explainable and trustworthy ML can resolve these ethical problems. Finally, we elaborate on the limitations of existing approaches and highlight various open research problems that require further development.