Peering Inside the Black Box: Explainable AI to Interpret Advanced Computer Vision Fungal Pathogen Prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Antimicrobial resistance is a growing concern, with pathogenic fungi making a substantial contribution to untreatable life-threatening infections across the globe. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in microbiology and antimicrobial resistance research, with promise to improve clinical diagnostics and infectious disease treatments. However, how AI models make predictions remains largely unknown, which is a major hurdle for human trust and regulatory approval. We train vision transformers (Swin Transformer-Tiny and Vision Transformer-Base 16) and convolutional neural networks (DenseNet121 and InceptionV3) to quickly and accurately identify pathogenic yeast species from microscopy images. Using explainable AI (Occlusion Sensitivity and Grad-CAM), we identify biologically relevant features (organelle, cell interior, cell wall, budding patterns/scars, and optical patterns) and irrelevant image features (background artifacts) these high-performance computer vision models may be using for pathogenic yeast classification. These findings improve AI-based microscopy classification of pathogenic yeast species and advance our understanding of the visual features these models rely on to make predictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".