Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming healthcare by supporting more accurate diagnoses, personalized treatments, and timely clinical decision-making. Yet, the “black box” nature of many AI systems raises concerns about transparency, reliability, and trust in patient care. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has, therefore, emerged as a crucial step toward ensuring that AI-driven tools are interpretable, accountable, and safe for use in clinical practice.

This Special Issue focuses on the real-world application of XAI in healthcare, in line with the journal’s mission to improve patient outcomes and strengthen healthcare practice. We are particularly interested in studies that demonstrate how explainability can enhance patient safety, support clinical adoption, improve decision-making processes, and address ethical or regulatory considerations in real healthcare settings.

We welcome original research and reviews that examine the role of XAI across various areas of healthcare delivery, including but not limited to interpretable AI for diagnosis and prognosis, XAI in medical imaging and decision support systems, patient-centered applications that foster trust and communication, and evaluations of how transparency impacts clinical workflows and outcomes.

We look forward to your contributions to this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Peter Kokol
Guest Editor

Dr. Jernej Završnik
Co-Guest Editor

Dr. Bojan Žlahtič
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.