Balancing Privacy and Explainability in Healthcare AI through Secure Multi-Party Computation and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66280/cis.v4i1.131Abstract
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence within healthcare systems has precipitated a fundamental tension between the necessity for stringent data privacy and the clinical requirement for model interpretability. While advanced deep learning architectures offer unprecedented diagnostic accuracy, their inherent opacity often clashes with the ethical and legal mandates for transparency in medical decision-making. Simultaneously, the sensitive nature of patient health information necessitates robust protection against data leakage, often complicating the deployment of centralized transparency tools. This research paper explores a system-level synthesis of Secure Multi-Party Computation and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations to bridge this gap. By leveraging cryptographic protocols to facilitate collaborative computation without exposing underlying datasets and integrating post-hoc explanation frameworks to clarify model behavior, this study proposes a robust architectural paradigm for trustworthy healthcare AI. The discussion emphasizes the structural trade-offs between computational overhead and clinical utility, the governance frameworks required for decentralized auditing, and the policy implications for data sovereignty in international medical research. Ultimately, the paper argues that the sustainability of healthcare AI depends on a socio-technical approach that treats privacy and explainability as mutually reinforcing objectives rather than zero-sum constraints, providing a comprehensive roadmap for deploying secure and interpretable diagnostic infrastructures in diverse clinical environments.
References
1.Abadi, M., Chu, A., Goodfellow, I., McMahan, H. B., Mironov, I., Talwar, K., & Zhang, L. (2016). Deep learning with differential privacy. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 308-318.
2.Adadi, A., & Berrada, M. (2018). Peeking inside the black-box: A survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). IEEE Access, 6, 52138-52160.
3.Ahmad, M. A., Eckert, C., & Tancik, M. (2018). Interpretable machine learning in healthcare. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics, 559-560.
4.Amann, J., Blasimme, A., Vayena, E., Frey, D., & Madai, V. I. (2020). Explainability for artificial intelligence in healthcare: A multidisciplinary perspective. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 20(1), 1-9.
5.Beaulieu-Jones, B. K., Yuan, W., Brat, G. A., Beam, A. L., Weber, G., Wyatt, M., ... & Kohane, I. S. (2019). Machine learning for patient risk stratification: Standing on, or looking over, the shoulders of clinicians? npj Digital Medicine, 2(1), 1-6.
6.Bellamy, R. K., Dey, K., Hind, M., Hoffman, S. C., Houde, S., Kannan, K., ... & Zhang, Y. (2019). AI Fairness 360: An extensible toolkit for detecting and mitigating algorithmic bias. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 63(4/5), 4-1.
7.Bonawitz, K., Ivanov, V., Kreuter, B., Marcedone, A., McMahan, H. B., Patel, S., ... & Seth, K. (2017). Practical secure aggregation for privacy-preserving machine learning. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 1175-1191.
8.Caruana, R., Lou, Y., Gehrke, J., Koch, P., Sturm, M., & Elhadad, N. (2015). Intelligible models for healthcare: Predicting pneumonia risk and hospital 30-day readmission. Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1721-1730.
9.Chen, J., Song, L., Wainwright, M. J., & Jordan, M. I. (2018). Learning to explain: An information-theoretic perspective on model interpretation. International Conference on Machine Learning, 883-892.
10.Choi, E., Bahadori, M. T., Song, L., Stewart, W. F., & Sun, J. (2017). GRAM: Graph-based attention model for healthcare representation learning. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 787-795.
11.Dwork, C. (2008). Differential privacy: A survey of results. International Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, 1-19.
12.Gade, K., Geyik, S. C., Kenthapadi, K., Mithal, V., & Taneja, A. (2019). Explainable AI in industry. Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, 3203-3204.
13.Ghassemi, M., Naumann, T., Schulam, P., Beam, A. L., Chen, I. Y., & Ranganath, R. (2020). A review of challenges and opportunities in machine learning for health. AMIA Summits on Translational Science Proceedings, 2020, 191.
14.Goldreich, O. (2004). Foundations of Cryptography: Volume 2, Basic Applications. Cambridge University Press.
15.Guidotti, R., Monreale, A., Ruggieri, S., Turini, F., Giannotti, F., & Pedreschi, D. (2018). A survey of methods for explaining black box models. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 51(5), 1-42.
16.He, J., Baxter, S. L., Xu, J., Xu, J., Zhou, X., & Zhang, K. (2019). The practical implementation of artificial intelligence in echocardiography. Nature Reviews Cardiology, 16(5), 290-297.
17.Kelly, C. J., Karthikesalingam, A., Suleyman, M., Corrado, G., & King, D. (2019). Key challenges for delivering clinical impact with artificial intelligence. BMC Medicine, 17(1), 1-9.
18.Kipf, T. N., & Welling, M. (2016). Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02907.
19.Kundu, S. (2019). AI in medicine: The 4th industrial revolution. International Journal of Surgery, 68, 82-84.
20.Lundberg, S. M., & Lee, S. I. (2017). A unified approach to interpreting model predictions. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
21.McMahan, B., Moore, E., Ramage, D., Hampson, S., & y Arcas, B. A. (2017). Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data. Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 1273-1282.
22.Mohassel, P., & Zhang, Y. (2017). SecureML: A system for scalable privacy-preserving machine learning. 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), 19-38.
23.Rajkomar, A., Dean, J., & Kohane, I. (2019). Machine learning in medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 380(14), 1347-1358.
24.Ribeiro, M. T., Singh, S., & Guestrin, C. (2016). "Why should I trust you?": Explaining the predictions of any classifier. Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1135-1144.
25.Ronneberger, O., Fischer, P., & Brox, T. (2015). U-Net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, 234-241.
26.Samek, W., Montavon, G., Vedaldi, A., Hansen, L. K., & Müller, K. R. (2019). Explainable AI: Interpreting, Explaining and Visualizing Deep Learning. Springer Nature.
27.Selbst, A. D., & Barocas, S. (2018). The intuitive appeal of explainable machines. Fordham Law Review, 87, 1085.
28.Shi, C., Li, S., Lu, W., Wu, W., Wang, C., Cheng, Z., ... & Chua, T. S. (2026). TraceRouter: Robust Safety for Large Foundation Models via Path-Level Intervention. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21900.
29.Shortliffe, E. H., & Sepúlveda, M. J. (2018). Clinical decision support in the era of artificial intelligence. JAMA, 320(21), 2199-2200.
30.Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: The convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 44-56.
31.Vayena, E., Blasimme, A., & Cohen, I. G. (2018). Machine learning in medicine: Addressing ethical challenges. PLoS Medicine, 15(11), e1002689.
32.Wang, F., Casalino, L. P., & Khullar, D. (2019). Deep learning in medicine—promise, progress, and dangers. JAMA Internal Medicine, 179(3), 293-294.
33.Yang, Q., Liu, Y., Chen, T., & Tong, Y. (2019). Federated machine learning: Concept and applications. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 10(2), 1-19.
34.Zyskind, G., & Nathan, O. (2015). Decentralizing privacy: Using blockchain to protect personal data. 2015 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, 180-184.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Computational Intelligence Systems

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.



