Papers › An Unsupervised Approach to Achieve Supervised-Level Explainability in Healthcare Records

An Unsupervised Approach to Achieve Supervised-Level Explainability in Healthcare Records

13 Jun 2024arXiv:2406.08958archive 2025-07-28

Joakim Edin, Maria Maistro, Lars Maaløe, Lasse Borgholt, Jakob D. Havtorn, Tuukka Ruotsalo

Electronic healthcare records are vital for patient safety as they document conditions, plans, and procedures in both free text and medical codes. Language models have significantly enhanced the processing of such records, streamlining workflows and reducing manual data entry, thereby saving healthcare providers significant resources. However, the black-box nature of these models often leaves healthcare professionals hesitant to trust them. State-of-the-art explainability methods increase model transparency but rely on human-annotated evidence spans, which are costly. In this study, we propose an approach to produce plausible and faithful explanations without needing such annotations. We demonstrate on the automated medical coding task that adversarial robustness training improves explanation plausibility and introduce AttInGrad, a new explanation method superior to previous ones. By combining both contributions in a fully unsupervised setup, we produce explanations of comparable quality, or better, to that of a supervised approach. We release our code and model weights.

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JoakimEdin/explainable-medical-coding officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Adversarial RobustnessExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Feature ImportanceMedical Code Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Code Prediction MIMIC-III PLM-CA Macro-F1 24.7 #2 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Code Prediction MIMIC-III PLM-CA Micro-F1 60.0 #2 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Code Prediction MIMIC-III PLM-CA mAP 64.7 #2 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

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