Call for Papers – Special Session on Explainable Artificial Intelligence Methods in Healthcare (WCCI 2026)

[Gabriella Casalino]

Dear Colleagues,
we are pleased to announce the Special Session on Explainable Artificial Intelligence Methods in Healthcare, which will be held within the 2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2026) in Maastricht, The Netherlands, from 21 to 26 June 2026.

🔗 Special Session Website:
https://sites.google.com/view/xaimh

Motivation & Scope

This Special Session aims to establish an international forum dedicated to eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods in healthcare, a domain where the need for trustworthy, transparent, and human-centered AI is especially critical.
In recent years, AI has achieved remarkable success in modeling complex medical data and supporting clinical decision-making. Nevertheless, the opacity of many data-driven systems continues to raise major concerns regarding fairness, accountability, and transparency, limiting their clinical adoption and societal acceptance.
We welcome contributions exploring both ante-hoc and post-hoc explainability approaches, ranging from inherently interpretable models—such as those based on fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy systems—to advanced explanation techniques applied after training black-box models such as deep neural networks. Particular attention is given to the impact of explanations on clinical understanding, decision support, and patient trust.
By bringing together researchers, clinicians, industry practitioners, and policy experts, this Special Session aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue on how transparent, explainable, and human-centric AI can enhance the safety, reliability, and practical adoption of intelligent systems in healthcare.

Topics of Interest (include but are not limited to):

• Fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy approaches for interpretable medical AI

• Explainable neural networks and hybrid neuro-symbolic models

• XAI for medical data streams, multimodal and temporal data

• Evaluation and visualization of explanations in clinical contexts

• Human-in-the-loop and participatory approaches to medical AI

• Clinical decision support with interpretable AI

• Trust, fairness, and safety in medical XAI

• Transparent AI for diagnostics, prognosis, and treatment planning
  
  

Organizers

• Gabriella Casalino, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

• Giovanna Castellano, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

• Katarzyna Kaczmarek-Majer, Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences; University of Ostrava

• Uzay Kaymak, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

• Gianluca Zaza, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

Submission Guidelines

• Submission deadline: January 31, 2026 (23:59, anywhere on Earth, UTC-12) No extension will be given.

• Full papers: up to 6 pages

• Up to 2 additional pages are allowed at an extra charge (maximum total: 8 pages)

• More details are available on the conference website:  https://attend.ieee.org/wcci-2026/information-for-authors/

• Please note that papers submitted to this Special Session will undergo the standard review process of the main conference and, if accepted, will be included in the WCCI 2026 conference proceedings.

We warmly invite you to consider submitting your work to this Special Session and to share this Call for Papers with colleagues and collaborators who might be interested.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Kind regards,
The Organizing Committee