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 study evaluates how well different medical foundation models agree on image embeddings by measuring mutual k‑nearest‑neighbor overlap across 750,000 images from 14 datasets and 18 public models. Results show that label‑supervised models converge the least, sharing only 6–10% of nearest neighbors, whereas models trained with self‑distillation, masked image modeling, or contrastive pretraining share up to 80%. The authors suggest that developers can select pretraining objectives to control convergence and recommend testing unlabeled images for nearest‑neighbor consistency before replacing a model.
By Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Mahshad Lotfinia, Lisa Adams, Sven Nebelung, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Daniel Truhn
The study evaluates a deep‑learning model for pediatric pneumonia detection across three countries, testing not only discrimination but also probability calibration, fixed operating‑point transport, shortcut signals, and limited‑label recoverability. Using a DenseNet121 ensemble trained on Guangzhou data, the model achieved high internal AUROC (0.976) but performance dropped to 0.798 and 0.742 on Bangladeshi and Vietnamese datasets, respectively. Limited‑label adaptation with Platt recalibration restored sensitivity but introduced significant specificity variability, highlighting the need for comprehensive cross‑dataset evaluation.
The study evaluates a deep‑learning model for pediatric pneumonia detection across chest X‑ray datasets from three countries, assessing discrimination, calibration, operating‑point transport, shortcut signals, and limited‑label recovery. Using a frozen DenseNet121 ensemble trained on Guangzhou data, the model achieved high internal AUROC (0.976) but performance dropped when applied zero‑shot to Bangladesh (AUROC 0.798) and Vietnam (AUROC 0.742). Limited‑label adaptation with Platt recalibration restored sensitivity but introduced significant specificity variability, highlighting the need to evaluate multiple performance dimensions in cross‑dataset transport studies.
By Nazim-E-Alam
The paper introduces MedDream, a radiographic world model that learns a shared continuous latent state from paired chest radiograph-text observations. MedDream outperforms existing diagnostic and generative AI models across eight clinical datasets, improving diagnostic reasoning, resident concordance, and evidence generation. Targeted synthetic augmentation guided by subgroup performance gaps further enhances model performance, particularly for Asian patients.
By Suyang Xi, Songtao Hu, Shansong Wang, Mojtaba Safari, Luke del Balzo, Ehsan Ul Karim, Mingzhe Hu, Kuo Zhang, Tonghe Wang, Ralph R. Weichselbaum, Xiaofeng Yang
arXiv:2607. 05628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and efficient classification of thoracic diseases in chest X-ray (CXR) images is crucial for timely diagnosis and treatment.
By Mohammad S. Majdi, Jeffrey J. Rodriguez
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:2609.37848v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Biomedical machine learning papers often compress model performance into one headline number. That number can look like a property of the model even...
By Bhanu Prakash Vangala, Sowmya Guda, Latha Peddi, Navya Vangala
The paper evaluates large language model (LLM) judges for radiology report assessment across multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions, comparing four existing metrics (RadFact, GREEN, FineRadScore, CRIMSON) with a new metric called VERT. GREEN emerges as the most robust among current metrics, while VERT improves correlation with radiologist judgments by up to 26% over GREEN. The study also shows that ensembling and lightweight fine‑tuning of the Qwen3‑30B model can yield additional performance gains and significant latency reductions.
By Federica Bologna, Jean-Philippe Corbeil, Matthew Wilkens, Asma Ben Abacha
Deep-learning models can achieve strong chest X-ray (CXR) classification performance without establishing whether their predictions predominantly rely on pulmonary image content. This study evaluates...
arXiv:2601.15891v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-language pretraining has driven progress in medical image representation learning, but it depends on paired image-text data and can inherit...
By Anas Anwarul Haq Khan, Mariam Husain, Pratik Jalan, Kshitij Jadhav
The study evaluated ten chest X‑ray AI classification models on 12 datasets from six countries, focusing on image‑level classification and measuring specificity at 95% sensitivity. MAVL and MedKLIP achieved the highest specificity (≈0.37) but still produced many false positives, with performance dropping on institutional cohorts compared to public benchmarks. No single model excelled across all findings, countries, or lesion types, highlighting limited generalisability.
By Qinmei Xu, Yiheng Li, Wenya Zhao, Zihao Zhao, Chuanjun Xu, Ahmet Gorkem Er, Xianghao Zhan, Brittany Dashevsky, Mohammed Alawad, Marc von der St\"uck, Marvin Gazibari\'c, Daniel Truhn, Shunsuke Shibata, Ryosuke Horino, Mio Ito, Akio Hiwatashi, Suyu Li, Mengya Yang, Ya Liu, Zhiyuan Sun, Changsheng Zhou, Haruka Itakura, Xiao Li, Olivier Gevaert