In chest X-ray (CXR) classification, acceptable ranking performance can still leave rare-positive patients below threshold, especially within subgroups. We study this pre-deployment fairness problem as an audit question: after a long-tailed multi-label CXR model is converted from scores into decisions, who is missed?
arXiv:2607. 07717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In chest X-ray (CXR) classification, acceptable ranking performance can still leave rare-positive patients below threshold, especially within subgroups.
arXiv:2607. 28608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical risk models routinely achieve strong aggregate performance while producing materially different error rates across patient subgroups.
The paper introduces FRAME, a two‑step framework for auditing fairness claims in medical imaging. First, it derives a fair‑model reference distribution that captures the portion of subgroup performance differences attributable to sampling variation. Second, it tests the remaining difference using operators in representation space to assess whether demographic information or disease entanglement drives the bias. Across a large dataset of 702,206 images and 36 encoders, the reference explains a substantial median share of race and age differences, while interventions such as injecting demographic decodability or entangling disease direction have limited impact on the residual bias.
Subgroup performance differences are the standard evidence for fairness bias in medical imaging, and the usual response removes the demographic information that a model encodes. Here we introduce Fair...
arXiv:2608. 14683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a patient's clinical findings, a diagnostic system ranks possible diseases and must decide when to endorse its first prediction or defer it for review.
arXiv:2608. 10505v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated radiology report generation is advancing rapidly in response to the shortage of radiologists, yet unlike a perception model, existing generation models offer no control over the sensitivity-specificity trade-off of their diagnostic content.
Automated radiology report generation is advancing rapidly in response to the shortage of radiologists, yet unlike a perception model, existing generation models offer no control over the sensitivity-specificity trade-off of their diagnostic content. Such control is essential because clinical scenarios diverge: emergency triage prioritizes sensitivity to reduce missed findings, whereas confirmatory interpretation emphasizes specificity to limit unnecessary interventions.
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.
The study examines how three parameter‑efficient adaptation methods—linear heads on the raw CLS token, an MLP, and an attention‑pooling module—affect pathology classification accuracy and subgroup fairness when applied to a frozen Rad‑DINO chest X‑ray encoder. Using the MIMIC‑CXR dataset, the authors evaluate eight pathologies across race, sex, and imaging‑view subgroups, finding that attention pooling yields the best overall performance and encodes protected attributes most strongly, yet higher performance does not consistently reduce subgroup disparities. The results show that attribute encoding strength and layer choice do not reliably predict fairness outcomes, indicating that fairness must be assessed directly for each task.
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 04025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-slide survival models commonly provide risk rankings without calibrated statements about individual event times.