An explainable deep learning model for prediction of early-stage chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major public health concern with rising prevalence and huge costs associated with dialysis and transplantation. Early prediction of CKD can reduce the patient's risk of CKD progression to end-stage kidney failure. Artificial intelligence offers more intelligent and expert healthcare services in disease diagnosis. In this work, a deep learning model is built using deep neural networks (DNN) with an adaptive moment estimation optimization function to predict early-stage CKD. The health care applications require interpretability over the predictions of the black-box model to build conviction towards the model's prediction. Hence, the predictions of the DNN-CKD model are explained by the local interpretable model-agnostic explainer (LIME). The diagnostic patient data is trained on five layered DNN with three hidden layers. Over the unseen data, the DNN-CKD model yields an accuracy of 98.75% and a roc_auc score of 98.86% in detecting CKD risk. The explanation revealed by the LIME algorithm echoes the influence of each feature on the prediction made by the DNN-CKD model over the given CKD data. With its interpretability and accuracy, the proposed system may effectively help medical experts in the early diagnosis of CKD.