Current evaluation protocols for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in Radiology Report Generation (RRG) rely on report-level metrics that measure lexical overlap or aggregate clinical correctness. However, such metrics do not test whether individual diagnostic statements stem from the actual pathological evidence visible in the image.
AlphaRAD introduces a grounded zero‑shot classification framework for chest radiology that leverages structured medical concepts extracted from reports and a novel α‑Corrected Binary Cross‑Entropy loss to reduce in‑batch noise. It also presents FLaS, a lightweight cross‑modal fusion module that factorizes VLPM representations into independent subspaces, improving spatial grounding without adding parameters. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on 16 classification benchmarks and sets new records on several grounding, phrase‑grounding, and segmentation datasets.
By Jianzhong You, Yuan Gao, Chris McIntosh
arXiv:2609.39266v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fine-grained vision-language alignment in chest radiography enables zero-shot classification, grounding, and segmentation without task-specific annotat...
By Qixing Zhao, Jinpeng Li
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN-ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT's patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training-inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability.
arXiv:2608. 00147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language pretraining learns rich medical image representations from radiology reports, but previous model variants commonly operate within a single shared embedding space, so concept-level structure and interpretability must be recovered post hoc, limiting model transparency and, hence, clinical utility.
By Fabian Drexel, Marlene Fritzsche, Era Stambollxhiu, Miriam Kumpf, Lena Schmitzer, Lea Schumann, Jannik Kahmann, Friedrich Puttkammer, Johannes Moll, Jannik L\"ubberstedt, Zeineb Ben Chaaben, Anirudh Narayanan, Cosmin I. Bercea, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Marcus R. Makowski, Daniel Rueckert, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem
arXiv:2606. 20477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations.
By Yusuf Salcan (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany, CRIION-AI Lab, Freiburg, Germany), Simon Ging (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany, Adaptive & Agentic AI), Robin Schirrmeister (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Philipp Arnold (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Elmar Kotter (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Behzad Bozorgtabar (Adaptive & Agentic AI), Thomas Brox (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany)