Posted by Dave Steiner, Clinical Research Scientist, Google Health, and Rory Pilgrim, Product Manager, Google Research There’s a worldwide shortage of access to medical imaging expert interpretation across specialties including radiology , dermatology and pathology . Machine learning (ML) technology can help ease this burden by powering tools that enable doctors to interpret these images more accurately and efficiently.
Posted by Pooja Rao, Research Scientist, Google Research Health datasets play a crucial role in research and medical education, but it can be challenging to create a dataset that represents the real world. For example, dermatology conditions are diverse in their appearance and severity and manifest differently across skin tones.
Posted by Rishabh Tiwari, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research Machine learning models in the real world are often trained on limited data that may contain unintended statistical biases . For example, in the CELEBA celebrity image dataset, a disproportionate number of female celebrities have blond hair, leading to classifiers incorrectly predicting “blond” as the hair color for most female faces — here, gender is a spurious feature for predicting hair color.
Posted by Mike Schaekermann, Research Scientist, Google Research, and Ivor Horn, Chief Health Equity Officer & Director, Google Core Health equity is a major societal concern worldwide with disparities having many causes. These sources include limitations in access to healthcare, differences in clinical treatment, and even fundamental differences in the diagnostic technology.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of machine learning and deep learning has revolutionized the efficiency of diagnostic, therapeutic, and administrative systems in healthcare.
arXiv:2607. 28538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying pathological scars from clinical photographs requires distinguishing keloids from hypertrophic scars despite limited expert-labeled data and substantial acquisition variation across hospitals.
This study evaluates the classification accuracy of six modern deep‑learning architectures—VGG19, ResNet50, GoogleNet, ConvNeXt, EfficientNet, and Vision Transformers—on breast ultrasound images categorized by BI‑RADS. Using 2,945 training images and 936 validation images from 1,540 patients, the models were tested in full fine‑tuning, linear evaluation, and training‑from‑scratch settings. The best performance was achieved with full fine‑tuning, yielding 76.39 % accuracy and a 67.94 % F1 score.
arXiv:2512. 21414v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent tool-use frameworks powered by vision-language models (VLMs) improve image understanding by grounding model predictions with specialized tools.
arXiv:2607. 05880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imaging demand is growing faster than the radiology workforce can expand, and reporting backlogs cannot be resolved through training and recruitment alone.
MultiViewDx is a physician‑validated multimodal instruction dataset that links medical imaging studies with patient context and normalizes heterogeneous reports into an evidence‑linked workflow (evidence → findings → differential discussion → diagnosis). The dataset covers a wide range of imaging modalities and uses a unified image‑text retriever to ensure that instruction synthesis is grounded in source‑supported evidence. Fine‑tuned models on MultiViewDx achieve the highest average accuracy on four MedVQA benchmarks and receive the strongest overall rating on JAMA Clinical Challenge cases, with ablations confirming the importance of case‑level multi‑view organization and evidence‑linked reasoning.
arXiv:2608. 16198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dermatology models face distribution shifts in teledermatology settings, where submitted images differ from the training data in lighting, angle, distance, focus, and framing.
The study examines why dermatology AI models, largely trained on light‑skinned, cancer‑focused images, perform poorly when applied to diverse patient populations. By comparing a cancer‑trained baseline, two dermatology foundation models, and a general‑purpose vision model on tone‑stratified and disease‑shifted datasets, the authors find that disease‑distribution shift, rather than skin‑tone underrepresentation, is the primary cause of generalization failure. Representation analysis shows that cancer‑specialized features lack transferable structure, while dermatology‑pretrained features maintain stronger clustering, and lightweight adaptation with about ten labeled examples per category can recover most performance.