The paper introduces SPAR‑Bench, a set of eight probes designed to test whether medical vision models can reason about anatomy in abdominal CT scans. Experiments across five architectures and three foundation models—both frozen and fine‑tuned—show that while models can recall canonical organ locations, they fail to perform relational reasoning or spatial comparisons within a patient, even under zero‑shot transfer. The study also demonstrates that pooled probing underestimates a model’s relational capabilities and that open‑weight multimodal large language models perform poorly on these tasks.
By Naren Akash, Neeraja Ramanan
The paper introduces MedREAL, a unified framework that aligns linguistic reasoning with spatial grounding for medical visual question answering and segmentation. MedREAL employs Seg Anchored Reasoning Pooling (SARP) to extract semantic evidence from segmentation tokens and a Reasoning-to-Visual (R2V) fusion mechanism to integrate these features into a segmentation pipeline. Using the newly created MedRAVS-13K dataset, MedREAL achieves superior performance, reporting 68.49% gIoU and 70.47% cIoU, and generates evidence masks that consistently match textual diagnoses.
By Haowen Gu, Gensheng Pei, Junzhu Mao, Qiong Wang, Mingwu Ren, Yazhou Yao
arXiv:2604.16729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) show high performance in general visual question answering. However, a fundamental limitation r...
By Ayhan Can Erdur, Daniel Scholz, Jiazhen Pan, Benedikt Wiestler, Daniel Rueckert, Jan C. Peeken
arXiv:2608. 03890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A clinically useful chest X-ray system must go beyond fluent report generation: it should classify findings with tunable decision thresholds, localize them spatially, and derive the anatomical measurements upon which many diagnoses depend.
By Mercy Prasanna Ranjit, Anirban Porya, Sathvik Joel, Niharika Vadlamudi, Nikhilesh Chowdary Eathamukkala, Prasanth V V, Abhyuday Kumara Swamy, Pranay Narhari Umredkar, Pradeep Narayan, Vivek Rajagopal, Tanuja Ganu
arXiv:2606. 28392v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate lesion segmentation in PET/CT is critical for oncology, yet remains challenging because physiologic tracer uptake and artifacts can mimic malignant signal.
By Jiasheng Wang, Tanun Jitwatcharakomol, Piyawadee Jongpradubgiat, Simeng Zhu
arXiv:2509.22404v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Anatomical understanding, which is the ability to identify, localize, or segment anatomical structures, is critical in medical image analysis; howe...
By Yiwei Li, Yikang Liu, Jiaqi Guo, Lin Zhao, Zheyuan Zhang, Xiao Chen, Boris Mailhe, Ankush Mukherjee, Terrence Chen, Shanhui Sun
arXiv:2603. 14579v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have shown significant promise in visual grounding for images as well as videos.
By Andrew Seohwan Yu, Mohsen Hariri, Kunio Nakamura, Mingrui Yang, Xiaojuan Li, Vipin Chaudhary
arXiv:2605.12413v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception, yet remain limited in reasoning about space under changing viewpoints. We s...
By Yuangong Chen, Wai Keung Wong, Jiaxing Li, Ioannis Patras, Xu Zheng
arXiv:2505.03380v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Accurate delineation of tumors and surrounding organs-at-risk is essential for radiotherapy, surgery and treatment response assessment, yet remains...
By Haonan Wang, Jiaji Mao, Lehan Wang, Qixiang Zhang, Marawan Elbatel, Yi Qin, Huijun Hu, Baoxun Li, Wenhui Deng, Weifeng Qin, Hongrui Li, Jialin Liang, Jun Shen, Xiaomeng Li
arXiv:2606. 17958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has emerged as a dominant research problem in medical image analysis, mitigating annotation scarcity by leveraging consistency regularization on unlabeled data.
By Yuming Chen, Yuxin Xie, Tao Zhou, Yi Zhou
arXiv:2608. 09818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable medical image understanding requires models to connect clinical language and visual reasoning with pixel-level grounding.
By Haoyu Yang, Meixing Shi, Zengjie Chen, Haoran Sun, Haitao Leng, Xiaoming Shi, Yuxiang Cai, Yankai Jiang
arXiv:2608.00239v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Learning transferable representations from CT-report pairs requires combining whole-volume context with anatomy-specific evidence. Existing methods...
By Guoliang You, Haifan Gong, Xiaomeng Chu