Artificial Intelligence has generated promissing results for the medical area, especially on the last decade. However, the best performing models present opacity when it comes to their internal working. In this thesis, methodologies and approaches are presented for the develpoment of explainable classifiers of medical images. Two main methods, Squaregrid and EvEx, were developed. The first consistts in a rough, but fast, generation of heatmaps via segmentations in square grids, and the second in genetic multi objective optimizations aiming at the fine-tuning of segmentation parameters. Notably, both techniques are agnostic to the model,which facilitates their utilization for any kind of image classifier. The potential of these approaches was demonstrated in three case studies of medical classifications: lymph node mestastases, malária and COVID-19. In some of these cases, already existing classifier models were analyzed, while in some others new models were trained. For the COVID-19 study, the trained ResNet50 provided F-scores above 0.9 in a test set from a coronavirus classification competition, resulting in the third place overall. Additionally, already existing explainable artificial intelligence techniques, such as LIME and GradCAM, as well as Vanilla, Smooth and Integrated Gradients, were also used to generate heatmaps and enable comparisons. The results here described help to demonstrate and improve the gaps in integrating the areas of explainable artificial intelligence and medicine. They also aided in demonstrating that the different types of approaches in explainable artificial intelligence can generate heatmaps that focus on different characteristics of the image. This shows the importance of combining approaches to create a more complete overview of classifier models, as well as extracting informations about what they learned from data.