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Feature visualization for convolutional neural network models trained on neuroimaging data

A major prerequisite for the application of machine learning models in clinical decision making is trust and interpretability. Current explainability studies in the neuroimaging community have mostly focused on explaining individual decisions of trained models, e.g. obtained by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Using attribution methods such as layer-wise relevance propagation or SHAP heatmaps can be created that highlight which regions of an input are more relevant for the decision than others. While this allows the detection of potential data set biases and can be used as a guide for a human expert, it does not allow an understanding of the underlying principles the model has learned. In this study, we instead show, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time results using feature visualization of neuroimaging CNNs. Particularly, we have trained CNNs for different tasks including sex classification and artificial lesion classification based on structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. We have then iteratively generated images that maximally activate specific neurons, in order to visualize the patterns they respond to. To improve the visualizations we compared several regularization strategies. The resulting images reveal the learned concepts of the artificial lesions, including their shapes, but remain hard to interpret for abstract features in the sex classification task.