Do not repeat these mistakes -- a critical appraisal of applications of explainable artificial intelligence for image based COVID-19 detection

The sudden outbreak and uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 disease is one of the most important global problems today. In a short period of time, it has led to the development of many deep neural network models for COVID-19 detection with modules for explainability. In this work, we carry out a systematic analysis of various aspects of proposed models. Our analysis revealed numerous mistakes made at different stages of data acquisition, model development, and explanation construction. In this work, we overview the approaches proposed in the surveyed ML articles and indicate typical errors emerging from the lack of deep understanding of the radiography domain. We present the perspective of both: experts in the field - radiologists, and deep learning engineers dealing with model explanations. The final result is a proposed a checklist with the minimum conditions to be met by a reliable COVID-19 diagnostic model.