Papers › The Effect of Counterfactuals on Reading Chest X-rays
The Effect of Counterfactuals on Reading Chest X-rays
Joseph Paul Cohen, Rupert Brooks, Sovann En, Evan Zucker, Anuj Pareek, Matthew Lungren, Akshay Chaudhari
This study evaluates the effect of counterfactual explanations on the interpretation of chest X-rays. We conduct a reader study with two radiologists assessing 240 chest X-ray predictions to rate their confidence that the model's prediction is correct using a 5 point scale. Half of the predictions are false positives. Each prediction is explained twice, once using traditional attribution methods and once with a counterfactual explanation. The overall results indicate that counterfactual explanations allow a radiologist to have more confidence in true positive predictions compared to traditional approaches (0.15±0.95 with p=0.01) with only a small increase in false positive predictions (0.04±1.06 with p=0.57). We observe the specific prediction tasks of Mass and Atelectasis appear to benefit the most compared to other tasks.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections