Concept Relationship Embedding-Based Interactive Web Application for Explainable Medical Diagnosis

摘要

Deep learning has made remarkable progress in medical image analysis, yet its black-box nature still limits interpretability and clinician trust. Concept-based modeling offers a promising direction for explainable AI by integrating human-understandable concepts. However, existing approaches typically rely on global concept annotations and infer diagnosis based solely on the presence or absence of individual concepts. This oversimplified paradigm ignores the rich relationships among concepts and their causal influence on disease outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Concept Relationship Embedding Model (CREM) for interpretable medical diagnosis. CREM mirrors coarse-to-fine clinical reasoning by first extracting fine-grained subregional concepts, then explicitly encoding their relationships as a concept interaction graph, and finally performing causal inference between concepts and diagnoses to enable reliable and transparent diagnostic predictions. We evaluate CREM on four public medical imaging benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance on both concept recognition and disease classification tasks, while exhibiting improved robustness, label efficiency, and interpretability. Furthermore, we deploy CREM as an interactive web-based demo that allows clinicians to visualize concept activations, trace diagnostic reasoning paths, and iteratively refine concept cues, facilitating effective human-in-the-loop decision-making.