Identification of kidney stones in KUB X-ray images using VGG16 empowered with explainable artificial intelligence

Abstract A kidney stone is a solid formation that can lead to kidney failure, severe pain, and reduced quality of life from urinary system blockages. While medical experts can interpret kidney-ureter-bladder (KUB) X-ray images, specific images pose challenges for human detection, requiring significant analysis time. Consequently, developing a detection system becomes crucial for accurately classifying KUB X-ray images. This article applies a transfer learning (TL) model with a pre-trained VGG16 empowered with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to establish a system that takes KUB X-ray images and accurately categorizes them as kidney stones or normal cases. The findings demonstrate that the model achieves a testing accuracy of 97.41% in identifying kidney stones or normal KUB X-rays in the dataset used. VGG16 model delivers highly accurate predictions but lacks fairness and explainability in their decision-making process. This study incorporates the Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) technique, an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) technique, to enhance the transparency and effectiveness of the model to address this concern. The XAI technique, specifically LRP, increases the model's fairness and transparency, facilitating human comprehension of the predictions. Consequently, XAI can play an important role in assisting doctors with the accurate identification of kidney stones, thereby facilitating the execution of effective treatment strategies.