arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

The Predictability Bias of Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning in Medical Imaging

The paper introduces TAP-JEPA, a joint‑embedding predictive architecture trained on over 113,000 CT volumes, which achieves performance comparable to leading encoders in scan‑level classification. It demonstrates a predictability bias: while anatomy is largely predictable from context, pathology is not, leading to significant degradation in pathology detection when predictions are applied. The study audits the model’s predictive pathway, showing that pathology representations shift toward control regions and that removing pathology tokens minimally affects downstream decisions, underscoring that contextual predictability alone is insufficient for clinical relevance.

By Fabian Drexel, Bernhard Kainz, Jakob N. Kather, Daniel Rueckert, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem, Cosmin I. Bercea
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Disease-Centric Vision-Language Pretraining with Hybrid Visual Encoding for 3D Computed Tomography

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 Computer Vision
Aug 28

DALE-CT: Depth-Aware 2D Slice Encoders Learn an Anatomical World Model of Chest CT

DALE-CT introduces depth‑aware 2D slice encoders that learn an anatomical world model of chest CT scans without 3D or positional supervision. By sampling self‑supervised views across a physical $z$‑axis slab, the encoder captures how anatomy changes between neighboring slices, enabling it to recover slice ordering and distinguish slices by anatomy alone. The model, trained on a large 287k‑scan corpus, achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on CT‑RATE and is released with full code and evaluation tools.

By Evan W. Damron, Mahmut S. Gokmen, Mitchell A. Klusty, Caroline N. Leach, Emily B. Collier, V. K. Cody Bumgardner