HelloAI glossary

Explainability

How far a person can understand why an AI tool produced a particular output. There are two routes to it. An interpretable model is simple enough to read directly, like a points-based risk score where you can see what each factor added. An explanation method sits on top of a complex model and approximates its reasoning after the fact, and the heatmap over a chest X-ray is the familiar example. The two give different things. A heatmap shows which pixels most influenced the output, and it says nothing about whether the finding there is real or why the model weighed it. Explanations can also make a wrong output look more convincing. For deciding whether to trust a tool, validation on your own patients tells you more than an explanation of a single case.

In the clinic

A fracture tool marks a wrist X-ray positive and paints a heatmap over the distal radius. The heatmap shows which pixels moved the score, and those might be the fracture line or might be the cast, the ruler, or a marker near that spot. Read the heatmap as a pointer to where you should look, then judge the finding yourself. If a tool's heatmaps keep landing on things that are not anatomy, that tells you something about what it learned.

Go beyond the definition

Terms like this come up in real clinical scenarios across the HelloAI courses: bite-sized modules with verifiable certificates. An account takes one minute, no password needed.

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