arXiv AI

OncoNoteBERT: A Foundation Representation Model for Natural Language Processing of Real-World Outpatient Oncology Notes

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Language Specificity vs. Domain Diversity: Benchmarking Transformers for Bangla Medical NER

This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.

By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

PORTER: Language-Grounded Event Representations for Portable Structured EHR Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 24102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most electronic health record (EHR) foundation models encode clinical events as discrete event tokens from a fixed vocabulary and therefore cannot directly represent events containing unseen concepts or new combinations of concepts and attributes such as numeric values.

By Lin Lawrence Guo, Adam Paul Yan, Emily Vettese, Lillian Sung
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Where Does the Signal Live? A Web Data Recipe for Medical Encoder Pretraining

The paper introduces a web‑data curation recipe for pretraining medical encoders, addressing the scarcity of large, diverse corpora in dense‑terminology domains like medicine. It proposes two complementary techniques: medical‑term density filtering to select documents rich in medical terminology, and signal‑amplifying rephrasing that uses an LLM to rewrite documents into denser variants with broader entity contexts. Applied to French medical NLP, the recipe produces the FineMed corpus and the DoctoBERT encoder family, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on the DrBenchmark public benchmark and a proprietary clinical NER task.

By Bofeng Huang, Jacques Sun, Diane Bouchacourt, Nicolas Barascud, Fajwel Fogel
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Semantic Context-aware mOdality fUsion Transformer (SCOUT): A Context-Aware Multimodal Transformer for Concept-Grounded Pathology Report Generation

SCOUT is a concept‑grounded multimodal transformer that generates whole‑slide pathology reports by integrating local histological patterns, whole‑slide context, and expert‑curated diagnostic concepts. It uses evolving visual representations and recursively updated slide‑ and concept‑conditioned representations, with separate attention pathways during decoding that are fused adaptively for each token. Evaluated on TCGA‑BRCA, HistAI, and REG‑2025, SCOUT outperformed existing methods, improving BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE‑L scores and raising the Clinical Report Quality Score on REG‑2025.

By Suryakant Singh, Saarthak Kapse, Joel Saltz, Prateek Prasanna
arXiv AI
Oct 2

A Comparative Explainability Framework for DeBERTa-v3 in Zero-Shot Medical Abstract Classification

The paper introduces a comparative explainability framework for auditing DeBERTa‑v3 in zero‑shot medical abstract classification. It evaluates five explanation methods—SHAP, LIME, occlusion, Input × Gradient, and Attention × Gradient—using a natural language inference engine on a balanced corpus of 1,000 abstracts per diagnostic category. The study finds that explanatory stability aligns with predictive certainty, identifies three systemic failure mechanisms, and recommends combining multiple explanation methods and quantitative agreement metrics for transformer‑based medical text classifiers.

By Javier Diaz Esteban-Herreros, David Mu\~noz-Valero, Raquel Mart\'inez-Espa\~na, Jose M. Juarez, Juan Moreno-Garcia
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Custom Named Entity Recognition and Topic Classification for Global Health Publications

This thesis explores how to select and adapt NLP models for global health literature when annotated data and computational resources are scarce. It compares skip‑gram word2vec models trained on increasingly large specialized corpora with BioWordVec for semantic tag discovery, finding that larger coverage does not always yield more useful domain associations. The study also evaluates convolutional spaCy models versus a RoBERTa transformer for named entity recognition, noting a trade‑off between higher F1 scores and longer inference time, and investigates MiniLM few‑shot versus BART‑MNLI zero‑shot classification for multi‑label topic classification, highlighting practical constraints of inference cost. "whyItMatters":"The work provides empirical guidance on balancing model accuracy and resource demands for building knowledge systems in low‑resource global health settings."

By Genis Skura, Antoine Geissb\"uhler, Jean-Luc Falcone
arXiv AI
Oct 2

OpenMTB-Audit: Exposing Over-Refusal and Clinical Expert Perspectives in LLM-Based Molecular Tumor Board Safety Evaluation

OpenMTB‑Audit is an open‑source benchmark that tests large language models on 500 synthetic non‑small cell lung cancer cases, covering five adversarial error categories and four safety labels: Supported, Partially Supported, Unsupported, and Insufficient Information. The study found that all eight tested LLMs over‑refused Partially Supported recommendations, collapsing labels to achieve high safety scores. A deterministic seven‑module framework, MTB‑AuditAgent, was introduced to reduce over‑refusal to 6.7% and reach 91.2% accuracy, while an oncologist annotation study highlighted disagreement around the boundary between information sufficiency and treatment optimization.

By Negin Ashrafi, Jia Luo, Stacey M. Frumm, Roxana Daneshjou
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

An end-to-end-trained vision-language model for native-language prostate pathology report generation

An end-to-end-trained vision-language model generates prostate biopsy reports in native languages, demonstrated in German. The system uses a tokenizer and model trained from scratch and an automated pipeline that splits composite reports into image-text pairs, producing 17,344 pairs from 2,402 cases without manual annotation. Evaluated on clinical attributes, it achieves 96.2% F1 for malignancy detection and 65.2% for Gleason grading, comparable to an FDA-cleared classifier and validated on external cohorts.

By Christian Grashei, Fabian G\"ulhan, Maximilian Legnar, Fabian St\"ogbauer, Cleo-Aron Weis, Carolin Mogler, Peter Sch\"uffler
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

HERO: Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology

HERO (Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology) is a ViT‑G/14 pathology foundation model trained with DINO and iBOT objectives and refined using high‑resolution Gram anchoring on a 500‑million‑tile corpus from about 575,000 clinical whole‑slide images. It demonstrates superior robustness to center, scanner, and stain variation compared to other state‑of‑the‑art foundation models, while maintaining competitive performance on tile‑level classification, segmentation, and gene‑expression prediction. Across 39 slide‑level clinical tasks, HERO ranks first on average and achieves the best average rank across six benchmark frameworks under an equal‑weighted analysis.

By Zhi Li (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Eghbal Amidi (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Yating Cheng (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Tyson Dawson (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Gorkem Can Ates (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Shuzhen Kuang (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Norsang Lama (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Md Ashequr Rahman (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Zhiying Lu (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Elisabeth K. Kong (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Milan Radovich (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), David Spetzler (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Matthew Oberley (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), George W. Sledge (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Ming Chen (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States)