The CXR‑LT 2026 Challenge introduces a multi‑center, long‑tailed chest X‑ray classification benchmark with over 145,000 radiologist‑annotated images from PadChest and NIH datasets. It defines two core tasks: robust multi‑label classification on 30 known classes and open‑world generalization to 6 unseen rare disease classes. The paper outlines data collection, annotation, solution strategies, and evaluates performance across head‑vs‑tail, calibration, and cross‑center gaps, noting that vision‑language models improve in‑distribution and zero‑shot performance but rare‑finding detection under multi‑center shift remains difficult.
By Hexin Dong, Yi Lin, Pengyu Zhou, Fengnian Zhao, Alan Clint Legasto, Juno Cho, Dohui Kim, Justin Namuk Kim, Mingeon Kim, Sunwoo Kwak, Gabriel Moy\`a-Alcover, Ky Trung Nguyen, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Ha-Hieu Pham, Huy-Hieu Pham, Huy Le Pham, Nikhileswara Rao Sulake, Aina Tur-Serrano, Ruichi Zhang, Ang Zu, Adam E. Flanders, Zhiyong Lu, Ronald M. Summers, Mingquan Lin, Hao Chen, Yuzhe Yang, George Shih, Yifan Peng
arXiv:2607. 00975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chest X-ray multi-label classification is a core task in intelligent medical imaging diagnosis.
By Tong Shao, Hongshun Ling, Li Zhang, Jinjing Wu, Junke Wang, Yuan Gao, Fang Wang
arXiv:2607. 26333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chest X-ray (CXR) machine learning relies heavily on automated evaluation using reference standards that aim to approximate clinical judgment.
By Panagiotis Fytas, Ian Selby, Clemens Karner, Judith Babar, Simon Baker, Jake Beckford, Timothy J. Sadler, Shahab Shahipasand, Arthikkaa Thavakumar, John Li Chen, Alex Sawer, Michael Roberts, Jonathan Weir-McCall, J. H. F. Rudd, Carola-Bibiane Sch\"onlieb, Anna Korhonen, Anna Breger
arXiv:2607. 04478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated chest X-ray classification remains challenging due to severe class imbalance, co-occurring pathologies, and the loss of localized features in conventional architectures.
By Moshiur Rahman, Shafqat Alam, Tasnia Binte Mamun
Med-AR introduces two autoregressive vision‑language models, Med‑AR‑8B and Med‑AR‑2B, pretrained on structured radiology reports, abnormality‑focused text, and region annotations to address long‑tailed chest X‑ray classification. The models outperform existing contrastive, self‑supervised, and supervised encoders—including Med‑CLIP, CheXFound, EVA‑Base, ARK, and BioViL‑T—across PadChest, MIMIC‑CXR, and CheXpert, achieving higher mean AUROC and AUPRC for head, medium, and tail findings and lower excess area under the risk‑coverage curve. Med‑AR also demonstrates improved selective‑prediction performance, with Med‑AR‑8B raising tail‑label mean AUPRC on MIMIC‑CXR from 0.1033 to 0.1441 and Med‑AR‑2B delivering the strongest discrimination on PadChest.
By Janhavi Prabhu, Sahil, Akshay V, Shivam Shukla, Manoj Tadepalli, Preetham Putha
The paper introduces the Cross‑Modal Triage Network (CMTN), a multimodal deep‑learning model that fuses a Swin Transformer V2 visual encoder with a PubMedBERT text encoder to perform severity‑based triage, pathology detection, and generate visual explanations for chest radiographs. Trained on 34,639 image‑text pairs from MIMIC‑CXR‑JPG, the CMTN achieves high ordinal agreement with reference labels (QWK = 0.9341) and excellent pathology detection (macro‑AUROC = 0.9970) while operating with 34 ms latency. However, a blinded clinical audit revealed low agreement with expert radiologists (QWK = 0.1399) and only modest spatial‑semantic concordance in heatmaps, underscoring the gap between algorithmic performance and clinical judgment.
By Zinah Ghulam, Richa Mittal, Eranga Ukwatta
arXiv:2607. 20641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clinical institutions to collaboratively train a shared disease classifier without centralizing patient data.
By Afsaneh Mahanipour, Hana Khamfroush
The paper introduces a label‑free method called AURCC for selecting the best foundational model for medical image classification when the target domain lacks labels. AURCC uses a pseudo‑label discrepancy computed by the SUDO framework to score models without fine‑tuning. Experiments on chest X‑ray data across three inter‑hospital shifts show that AURCC closely matches the true model ranking, outperforming simple source‑accuracy baselines especially when source data are limited.
By Juan I\~naki Larrea, Lucas Mansilla, Enzo Ferrante
arXiv:2608.21571v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Lung cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and early diagnosis is critical for improving survival. However, early-stage...
By Olivera Kotevska, Ian Goethert, Michael McGee, Maria Mahbub, Sean R. Wilkinson, Rowena Yip, Myvizhi Esai Selvan, Zeynep H. Gumus, Claudia Henschke, Robert J. Klein, Providencia Morales, Samuel M Aguayo, Ioana Danciu, Mayanka Chandrashekar
The paper introduces the Exponential Pixelating Integral (EPI) transform, which enhances pixel intensities in chest X‑rays to mitigate low‑contrast and noise issues. The enhanced images are polar‑transformed and represented using locally invariant Mandelbrot and Julia fractal geometries, producing dual fractal features. These features are classified with non‑parametric multivariate adaptive regression splines, achieving high accuracy (98.46–99.45%) and F1 scores (96.53–98.10%) on large benchmark datasets.
By Naveenraj Kamalakannan, Sri Ram Macharla, M Kanimozhi, M S Sudhakar
arXiv:2509. 19671v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public datasets of Chest X-Rays (CXRs) have long been a popular benchmark for developing machine learning (ML) computer vision models in healthcare.
By Andrew Wang, Jiashuo Zhang, Michael Oberst
arXiv:2607. 09305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chest radiography (CXR) remains the most widely used thoracic imaging modality, yet expert interpretation is constrained by a severe shortage of radiologists in Thailand and across Southeast Asia.
By Isarun Chamveha, Tretap Promwiset, Napat Wanchaitanawong, Trongtum Tongdee, Pairash Saiviroonporn, Warasinee Chaisangmongkon