Transparency of Classification Systems for Clinical Decision Support

Richard, Antoine; Mayag, Brice; Talbot, François; Tsoukias, Alexis; Meinard, Yves

In collaboration with the Civil Hospitals of Lyon, we aim to develop a “transparent” classification system for medical purposes. To do so, we need clear definitions and operational criteria to determine what is a “transparent” classification system in our context. However, the term “transparency” is often left undefined in the literature, and there is a lack of operational criteria allowing to check whether a given algorithm deserves to be called “transparent” or not. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a definition of “transparency” for classification systems in medical contexts. We also propose several operational criteria to evaluate whether a classification system can be considered “transparent”. We apply these operational criteria to evaluate the “transparency” of several well-known classification systems.