This study evaluates the effect of counterfactual explanations on the interpretation of chest X-rays. We conduct a reader study with two radiologists assessing 240 chest X-ray predictions to rate their confidence that the model's prediction is correct using a 5 point scale. Half of the predictions are false positives. Each prediction is explained twice, once using traditional attribution methods and once with a counterfactual explanation. The overall results indicate that counterfactual explanations allow a radiologist to have more confidence in true positive predictions compared to traditional approaches (0.15$\pm$0.95 with p=0.01) with only a small increase in false positive predictions (0.04$\pm$1.06 with p=0.57). We observe the specific prediction tasks of Mass and Atelectasis appear to benefit the most compared to other tasks.

翻译：本研究评估了反事实解释对胸片解读的影响。我们开展了一项读者研究，由两位放射科医师对240个胸片预测结果进行评估，采用5分制评分标准，以判断模型预测正确的置信度。其中一半预测结果为假阳性。每个预测结果均被解释两次，一次使用传统归因方法，另一次使用反事实解释。总体结果表明，与传统方法相比，反事实解释能使放射科医师对真阳性预测结果更有信心（差异值为0.15±0.95，p=0.01），而假阳性预测结果仅有小幅增加（差异值为0.04±1.06，p=0.57）。我们还观察到，与其他预测任务相比，肿块（Mass）和肺不张（Atelectasis）的特定预测任务似乎受益最为显著。