Daily Papers

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) of the eye has become essential to ophthalmology and the emerging field of oculomics, thus requiring a need for transparent, reproducible, and rapid analysis of this data for clinical research and the wider research community. Here, we introduce OCTolyzer, the first open-source toolkit for retinochoroidal analysis in OCT/SLO data. It features two analysis suites for OCT and SLO data, facilitating deep learning-based anatomical segmentation and feature extraction of the cross-sectional retinal and choroidal layers and en face retinal vessels. We describe OCTolyzer and evaluate the reproducibility of its OCT choroid analysis. At the population level, metrics for choroid region thickness were highly reproducible, with a mean absolute error (MAE)/Pearson correlation for macular volume choroid thickness (CT) of 6.7mum/0.99, macular B-scan CT of 11.6mum/0.99, and peripapillary CT of 5.0mum/0.99. Macular choroid vascular index (CVI) also showed strong reproducibility, with MAE/Pearson for volume CVI yielding 0.0271/0.97 and B-scan CVI 0.0130/0.91. At the eye level, measurement noise for regional and vessel metrics was below 5% and 20% of the population's variability, respectively. Outliers were caused by poor-quality B-scans with thick choroids and invisible choroid-sclera boundary. Processing times on a laptop CPU were under three seconds for macular/peripapillary B-scans and 85 seconds for volume scans. OCTolyzer can convert OCT/SLO data into reproducible and clinically meaningful retinochoroidal features and will improve the standardisation of ocular measurements in OCT/SLO image analysis, requiring no specialised training or proprietary software to be used. OCTolyzer is freely available here: https://github.com/jaburke166/OCTolyzer.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique with extensive clinical applications in ophthalmology. OCT enables the visualization of the retinal layers, playing a vital role in the early detection and monitoring of retinal diseases. OCT uses the principle of light wave interference to create detailed images of the retinal microstructures, making it a valuable tool for diagnosing ocular conditions. This work presents an open-access OCT dataset (OCTDL) comprising over 1600 high-resolution OCT images labeled according to disease group and retinal pathology. The dataset consists of OCT records of patients with Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), Epiretinal Membrane (ERM), Retinal Artery Occlusion (RAO), Retinal Vein Occlusion (RVO), and Vitreomacular Interface Disease (VID). The images were acquired with an Optovue Avanti RTVue XR using raster scanning protocols with dynamic scan length and image resolution. Each retinal b-scan was acquired by centering on the fovea and interpreted and cataloged by an experienced retinal specialist. In this work, we applied Deep Learning classification techniques to this new open-access dataset.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging modality which is widely used in clinical ophthalmology. OCT images are capable of visualizing deep retinal layers which is crucial for early diagnosis of retinal diseases. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive open-access database containing more than 500 highresolution images categorized into different pathological conditions. The image classes include Normal (NO), Macular Hole (MH), Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Central Serous Retinopathy (CSR), and Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). The images were obtained from a raster scan protocol with a 2mm scan length and 512x1024 pixel resolution. We have also included 25 normal OCT images with their corresponding ground truth delineations which can be used for an accurate evaluation of OCT image segmentation. In addition, we have provided a user-friendly GUI which can be used by clinicians for manual (and semi-automated) segmentation.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging from different camera devices causes challenging domain shifts and can cause a severe drop in accuracy for machine learning models. In this work, we introduce a minimal noise adaptation method based on a singular value decomposition (SVDNA) to overcome the domain gap between target domains from three different device manufacturers in retinal OCT imaging. Our method utilizes the difference in noise structure to successfully bridge the domain gap between different OCT devices and transfer the style from unlabeled target domain images to source images for which manual annotations are available. We demonstrate how this method, despite its simplicity, compares or even outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods for semantic segmentation on a public OCT dataset. SVDNA can be integrated with just a few lines of code into the augmentation pipeline of any network which is in contrast to many state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods which often need to change the underlying model architecture or train a separate style transfer model. The full code implementation for SVDNA is available at https://github.com/ValentinKoch/SVDNA.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a fundamental tool for assisting clinicians in analyzing ophthalmic images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, developing AI models often requires extensive annotation, and existing models tend to underperform on independent, unseen data. Foundation models (FMs), large AI models trained on vast unlabeled datasets, have shown promise in overcoming these challenges. Nonetheless, available FMs for ophthalmology lack extensive validation, especially for segmentation tasks, and focus on a single imaging modality. In this context, we propose MIRAGE, a novel multimodal FM for the analysis of OCT and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) images. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation benchmark with OCT/SLO classification and segmentation tasks. The comparison with general and specialized FMs and segmentation methods shows the superiority of MIRAGE in both types of tasks, highlighting its suitability as a basis for the development of robust AI systems for retinal OCT image analysis. Both MIRAGE and the evaluation benchmark are publicly available: https://github.com/j-morano/MIRAGE.

Retinal imaging has emerged as a powerful, non-invasive modality for detecting and quantifying biomarkers of systemic diseases-ranging from diabetes and hypertension to Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disorders but current insights remain dispersed across platforms and specialties. Recent technological advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT/OCTA) and adaptive optics (AO) now deliver ultra-high-resolution scans (down to 5 {\mu}m ) with superior contrast and spatial integration, allowing early identification of microvascular abnormalities and neurodegenerative changes. At the same time, AI-driven and machine learning (ML) algorithms have revolutionized the analysis of large-scale retinal datasets, increasing sensitivity and specificity; for example, deep learning models achieve > 90 \% sensitivity for diabetic retinopathy and AUC = 0.89 for the prediction of cardiovascular risk from fundus photographs. The proliferation of mobile health technologies and telemedicine platforms further extends access, reduces costs, and facilitates community-based screening and longitudinal monitoring. Despite these breakthroughs, translation into routine practice is hindered by heterogeneous imaging protocols, limited external validation of AI models, and integration challenges within clinical workflows. In this review, we systematically synthesize the latest OCT/OCT and AO developments, AI/ML approaches, and mHealth/Tele-ophthalmology initiatives and quantify their diagnostic performance across disease domains. Finally, we propose a roadmap for multicenter protocol standardization, prospective validation trials, and seamless incorporation of retinal screening into primary and specialty care pathways-paving the way for precision prevention, early intervention, and ongoing treatment of life-threatening systemic diseases.

Automated segmentation of retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images has become an important recent direction in machine learning for medical applications. We hypothesize that the anatomic structure of layers and their high-frequency variation in OCT images make retinal OCT a fitting choice for extracting spectral-domain features and combining them with spatial domain features. In this work, we present Upsilon-Net, an architecture that combines the frequency domain features with the image domain to improve the segmentation performance of OCT images. The results of this work demonstrate that the introduction of two branches, one for spectral and one for spatial domain features, brings a very significant improvement in fluid segmentation performance and allows outperformance as compared to the well-known U-Net model. Our improvement was 13% on the fluid segmentation dice score and 1.9% on the average dice score. Finally, removing selected frequency ranges in the spectral domain demonstrates the impact of these features on the fluid segmentation outperformance.

Color fundus photography and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) are the two most cost-effective tools for glaucoma screening. Both two modalities of images have prominent biomarkers to indicate glaucoma suspected. Clinically, it is often recommended to take both of the screenings for a more accurate and reliable diagnosis. However, although numerous algorithms are proposed based on fundus images or OCT volumes in computer-aided diagnosis, there are still few methods leveraging both of the modalities for the glaucoma assessment. Inspired by the success of Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge (REFUGE) we held previously, we set up the Glaucoma grAding from Multi-Modality imAges (GAMMA) Challenge to encourage the development of fundus \& OCT-based glaucoma grading. The primary task of the challenge is to grade glaucoma from both the 2D fundus images and 3D OCT scanning volumes. As part of GAMMA, we have publicly released a glaucoma annotated dataset with both 2D fundus color photography and 3D OCT volumes, which is the first multi-modality dataset for glaucoma grading. In addition, an evaluation framework is also established to evaluate the performance of the submitted methods. During the challenge, 1272 results were submitted, and finally, top-10 teams were selected to the final stage. We analysis their results and summarize their methods in the paper. Since all these teams submitted their source code in the challenge, a detailed ablation study is also conducted to verify the effectiveness of the particular modules proposed. We find many of the proposed techniques are practical for the clinical diagnosis of glaucoma. As the first in-depth study of fundus \& OCT multi-modality glaucoma grading, we believe the GAMMA Challenge will be an essential starting point for future research.

The rise of imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and advances in deep learning (DL) have enabled clinicians and researchers to streamline retinal disease staging. A popular DL approach is self-supervised learning (SSL), where models learn from vast amounts of unlabeled data, avoiding costly annotation. SSL has allowed the development of foundation models (FMs), large models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks. However, existing FMs for OCT, trained solely on image data, lack a comprehensive and robust semantic understanding of images, as evidenced by their downstream performance (especially for complex tasks), and thus require supervised fine-tuning (which may be unfeasible) to better adapt to specific applications and populations. To address this, we propose RetFiner, an SSL vision-language refinement scheme that improves the representations of existing FMs and enables their efficient and direct adaptation to specific populations for improved downstream performance. Our method uses a diverse set of training objectives which take advantage of the rich supervisory signal found in textual data. We tested RetFiner on the retinal FMs RETFound, UrFound, and VisionFM, showing significant improvements in linear probing performance on seven highly diverse OCT classification tasks, with an average increase of 5.8, 3.9, and 2.1 percentage points over their baselines, respectively. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/ronnief1/RetFiner.

The VIP Cup offers a unique experience to undergraduates, allowing students to work together to solve challenging, real-world problems with video and image processing techniques. In this iteration of the VIP Cup, we challenged students to balance personalization and generalization when performing biomarker detection in 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Balancing personalization and generalization is an important challenge to tackle, as the variation within OCT scans of patients between visits can be minimal while the difference in manifestation of the same disease across different patients may be substantial. The domain difference between OCT scans can arise due to pathology manifestation across patients, clinical labels, and the visit along the treatment process when the scan is taken. Hence, we provided a multimodal OCT dataset to allow teams to effectively target this challenge. Overall, this competition gave undergraduates an opportunity to learn about how artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for the medical field, as well as the unique challenges one faces when applying machine learning to biomedical data.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced reasoning in natural scenes, but their role in medical imaging remains underexplored. Medical reasoning tasks demand robust image analysis and well-justified answers, posing challenges due to the complexity of medical images. Transparency and trustworthiness are essential for clinical adoption and regulatory compliance. We introduce Med-R1, a framework exploring reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance VLMs' generalizability and trustworthiness in medical reasoning. Leveraging the DeepSeek strategy, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to guide reasoning paths via reward signals. Unlike supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often overfits and lacks generalization, RL fosters robust and diverse reasoning. Med-R1 is evaluated across eight medical imaging modalities: CT, MRI, Ultrasound, Dermoscopy, Fundus Photography, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), Microscopy, and X-ray Imaging. Compared to its base model, Qwen2-VL-2B, Med-R1 achieves a 29.94% accuracy improvement and outperforms Qwen2-VL-72B, which has 36 times more parameters. Testing across five question types-modality recognition, anatomy identification, disease diagnosis, lesion grading, and biological attribute analysis Med-R1 demonstrates superior generalization, exceeding Qwen2-VL-2B by 32.06% and surpassing Qwen2-VL-72B in question-type generalization. These findings show that RL improves medical reasoning and enables parameter-efficient models to outperform significantly larger ones. With interpretable reasoning outputs, Med-R1 represents a promising step toward generalizable, trustworthy, and clinically viable medical VLMs.

Clinical diagnosis of the eye is performed over multifarious data modalities including scalar clinical labels, vectorized biomarkers, two-dimensional fundus images, and three-dimensional Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans. Clinical practitioners use all available data modalities for diagnosing and treating eye diseases like Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) or Diabetic Macular Edema (DME). Enabling usage of machine learning algorithms within the ophthalmic medical domain requires research into the relationships and interactions between all relevant data over a treatment period. Existing datasets are limited in that they neither provide data nor consider the explicit relationship modeling between the data modalities. In this paper, we introduce the Ophthalmic Labels for Investigating Visual Eye Semantics (OLIVES) dataset that addresses the above limitation. This is the first OCT and near-IR fundus dataset that includes clinical labels, biomarker labels, disease labels, and time-series patient treatment information from associated clinical trials. The dataset consists of 1268 near-IR fundus images each with at least 49 OCT scans, and 16 biomarkers, along with 4 clinical labels and a disease diagnosis of DR or DME. In total, there are 96 eyes' data averaged over a period of at least two years with each eye treated for an average of 66 weeks and 7 injections. We benchmark the utility of OLIVES dataset for ophthalmic data as well as provide benchmarks and concrete research directions for core and emerging machine learning paradigms within medical image analysis.

Retinal foundation models aim to learn generalizable representations from diverse retinal images, facilitating label-efficient model adaptation across various ophthalmic tasks. Despite their success, current retinal foundation models are generally restricted to a single imaging modality, such as Color Fundus Photography (CFP) or Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), limiting their versatility. Moreover, these models may struggle to fully leverage expert annotations and overlook the valuable domain knowledge essential for domain-specific representation learning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce UrFound, a retinal foundation model designed to learn universal representations from both multimodal retinal images and domain knowledge. UrFound is equipped with a modality-agnostic image encoder and accepts either CFP or OCT images as inputs. To integrate domain knowledge into representation learning, we encode expert annotation in text supervision and propose a knowledge-guided masked modeling strategy for model pre-training. It involves reconstructing randomly masked patches of retinal images while predicting masked text tokens conditioned on the corresponding retinal image. This approach aligns multimodal images and textual expert annotations within a unified latent space, facilitating generalizable and domain-specific representation learning. Experimental results demonstrate that UrFound exhibits strong generalization ability and data efficiency when adapting to various tasks in retinal image analysis. By training on ~180k retinal images, UrFound significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art retinal foundation model trained on up to 1.6 million unlabelled images across 8 public retinal datasets. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yukkai/UrFound.

Glaucoma is the number one cause of irreversible blindness globally. A major challenge for accurate glaucoma detection and progression forecasting is the bottleneck of limited labeled patients with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D retinal imaging data of optical coherence tomography (OCT). To address the data scarcity issue, this paper proposes two solutions. First, we develop a novel generalization-reinforced semi-supervised learning (SSL) model called pseudo supervisor to optimally utilize unlabeled data. Compared with SOTA models, the proposed pseudo supervisor optimizes the policy of predicting pseudo labels with unlabeled samples to improve empirical generalization. Our pseudo supervisor model is evaluated with two clinical tasks consisting of glaucoma detection and progression forecasting. The progression forecasting task is evaluated both unimodally and multimodally. Our pseudo supervisor model demonstrates superior performance than SOTA SSL comparison models. Moreover, our model also achieves the best results on the publicly available LAG fundus dataset. Second, we introduce the Harvard Glaucoma Detection and Progression (Harvard-GDP) Dataset, a multimodal multitask dataset that includes data from 1,000 patients with OCT imaging data, as well as labels for glaucoma detection and progression. This is the largest glaucoma detection dataset with 3D OCT imaging data and the first glaucoma progression forecasting dataset that is publicly available. Detailed sex and racial analysis are provided, which can be used by interested researchers for fairness learning studies. Our released dataset is benchmarked with several SOTA supervised CNN and transformer deep learning models. The dataset and code are made publicly available via https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-gdp1000.

We present OCTCube-M, a 3D OCT-based multi-modal foundation model for jointly analyzing OCT and en face images. OCTCube-M first developed OCTCube, a 3D foundation model pre-trained on 26,685 3D OCT volumes encompassing 1.62 million 2D OCT images. It then exploits a novel multi-modal contrastive learning framework COEP to integrate other retinal imaging modalities, such as fundus autofluorescence and infrared retinal imaging, into OCTCube, efficiently extending it into multi-modal foundation models. OCTCube achieves best performance on predicting 8 retinal diseases, demonstrating strong generalizability on cross-cohort, cross-device and cross-modality prediction. OCTCube can also predict cross-organ nodule malignancy (CT) and low cardiac ejection fraction as well as systemic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, revealing its wide applicability beyond retinal diseases. We further develop OCTCube-IR using COEP with 26,685 OCT and IR image pairs. OCTCube-IR can accurately retrieve between OCT and IR images, allowing joint analysis between 3D and 2D retinal imaging modalities. Finally, we trained a tri-modal foundation model OCTCube-EF from 4 million 2D OCT images and 400K en face retinal images. OCTCube-EF attains the best performance on predicting the growth rate of geographic atrophy (GA) across datasets collected from 6 multi-center global trials conducted in 23 countries. This improvement is statistically equivalent to running a clinical trial with more than double the size of the original study. Our analysis based on another retrospective case study reveals OCTCube-EF's ability to avoid false positive Phase-III results according to its accurate treatment effect estimation on the Phase-II results. In sum, OCTCube-M is a 3D multi-modal foundation model framework that integrates OCT and other retinal imaging modalities revealing substantial diagnostic and prognostic benefits.

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a novel imaging modality that has been widely utilized in ophthalmology and neuroscience studies to observe retinal vessels and microvascular systems. However, publicly available OCTA datasets remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce the largest and most comprehensive OCTA dataset dubbed OCTA-500, which contains OCTA imaging under two fields of view (FOVs) from 500 subjects. The dataset provides rich images and annotations including two modalities (OCT/OCTA volumes), six types of projections, four types of text labels (age / gender / eye / disease) and seven types of segmentation labels (large vessel/capillary/artery/vein/2D FAZ/3D FAZ/retinal layers). Then, we propose a multi-object segmentation task called CAVF, which integrates capillary segmentation, artery segmentation, vein segmentation, and FAZ segmentation under a unified framework. In addition, we optimize the 3D-to-2D image projection network (IPN) to IPN-V2 to serve as one of the segmentation baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that IPN-V2 achieves an ~10% mIoU improvement over IPN on CAVF task. Finally, we further study the impact of several dataset characteristics: the training set size, the model input (OCT/OCTA, 3D volume/2D projection), the baseline networks, and the diseases. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://ieee-dataport.org/open-access/octa-500.

Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) and its derived en-face projections provide high-resolution visualization of the retinal and choroidal vasculature, which is critical for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of retinal diseases. However, acquiring high-quality OCTA images is challenging due to motion sensitivity and the high costs associated with software modifications for conventional OCT devices. Moreover, current deep learning methods for OCT-to-OCTA translation often overlook the vascular differences across retinal layers and struggle to reconstruct the intricate, dense vascular details necessary for reliable diagnosis. To overcome these limitations, we propose XOCT, a novel deep learning framework that integrates Cross-Dimensional Supervision (CDS) with a Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MSFF) network for layer-aware vascular reconstruction. Our CDS module leverages 2D layer-wise en-face projections, generated via segmentation-weighted z-axis averaging, as supervisory signals to compel the network to learn distinct representations for each retinal layer through fine-grained, targeted guidance. Meanwhile, the MSFF module enhances vessel delineation through multi-scale feature extraction combined with a channel reweighting strategy, effectively capturing vascular details at multiple spatial scales. Our experiments on the OCTA-500 dataset demonstrate XOCT's improvements, especially for the en-face projections which are significant for clinical evaluation of retinal pathologies, underscoring its potential to enhance OCTA accessibility, reliability, and diagnostic value for ophthalmic disease detection and monitoring. The code is available at https://github.com/uci-cbcl/XOCT.

The oxygen saturation level in the blood (SaO2) is crucial for health, particularly in relation to sleep-related breathing disorders. However, continuous monitoring of SaO2 is time-consuming and highly variable depending on patients' conditions. Recently, optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) has shown promising development in rapidly and effectively screening eye-related lesions, offering the potential for diagnosing sleep-related disorders. To bridge this gap, our paper presents three key contributions. Firstly, we propose JointViT, a novel model based on the Vision Transformer architecture, incorporating a joint loss function for supervision. Secondly, we introduce a balancing augmentation technique during data preprocessing to improve the model's performance, particularly on the long-tail distribution within the OCTA dataset. Lastly, through comprehensive experiments on the OCTA dataset, our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of up to 12.28% in overall accuracy. This advancement lays the groundwork for the future utilization of OCTA in diagnosing sleep-related disorders. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/JointViT

Early detection of gastric cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, remains hampered by the limitations of current diagnostic technologies, leading to high rates of misdiagnosis and missed diagnoses. To address these challenges, we propose an integrated system that synergizes advanced hardware and software technologies to balance speed-accuracy. Our study introduces the One Class Twin Cross Learning (OCT-X) algorithm. Leveraging a novel fast double-threshold grid search strategy (FDT-GS) and a patch-based deep fully convolutional network, OCT-X maximizes diagnostic accuracy through real-time data processing and seamless lesion surveillance. The hardware component includes an all-in-one point-of-care testing (POCT) device with high-resolution imaging sensors, real-time data processing, and wireless connectivity, facilitated by the NI CompactDAQ and LabVIEW software. Our integrated system achieved an unprecedented diagnostic accuracy of 99.70%, significantly outperforming existing models by up to 4.47%, and demonstrated a 10% improvement in multirate adaptability. These findings underscore the potential of OCT-X as well as the integrated system in clinical diagnostics, offering a path toward more accurate, efficient, and less invasive early gastric cancer detection. Future research will explore broader applications, further advancing oncological diagnostics. Code is available at https://github.com/liu37972/Multirate-Location-on-OCT-X-Learning.git.

Retinal detachment (RD) is a vision-threatening condition that requires timely intervention to preserve vision. Macular involvement -- whether the macula is still intact (macula-intact) or detached (macula-detached) -- is the key determinant of visual outcomes and treatment urgency. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) offers a fast, non-invasive, cost-effective, and accessible imaging modality widely used in diverse clinical settings to detect RD. However, ultrasound image interpretation is limited by a lack of expertise among healthcare providers, especially in resource-limited settings. Deep learning offers the potential to automate ultrasound-based assessment of RD. However, there are no ML ultrasound algorithms currently available for clinical use to detect RD and no prior research has been done on assessing macular status using ultrasound in RD cases -- an essential distinction for surgical prioritization. Moreover, no public dataset currently supports macular-based RD classification using ultrasound video clips. We introduce Eye Retinal DEtachment ultraSound, ERDES, the first open-access dataset of ocular ultrasound clips labeled for (i) presence of retinal detachment and (ii) macula-intact versus macula-detached status. The dataset is intended to facilitate the development and evaluation of machine learning models for detecting retinal detachment. We also provide baseline benchmarks using multiple spatiotemporal convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. All clips, labels, and training code are publicly available at https://osupcvlab.github.io/ERDES/.

Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide and poses significant diagnostic challenges due to its reliance on subjective evaluation. However, recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have demonstrated the potential for automated assessment. In this paper, we survey recent studies on AI-based glaucoma diagnosis using fundus, optical coherence tomography, and visual field images, with a particular emphasis on deep learning-based methods. We provide an updated taxonomy that organizes methods into architectural paradigms and includes links to available source code to enhance the reproducibility of the methods. Through rigorous benchmarking on widely-used public datasets, we reveal performance gaps in generalizability, uncertainty estimation, and multimodal integration. Additionally, our survey curates key datasets while highlighting limitations such as scale, labeling inconsistencies, and bias. We outline open research challenges and detail promising directions for future studies. This survey is expected to be useful for both AI researchers seeking to translate advances into practice and ophthalmologists aiming to improve clinical workflows and diagnosis using the latest AI outcomes.

Automatic estimation of cardiac ultrasound image quality can be beneficial for guiding operators and ensuring the accuracy of clinical measurements. Previous work often fails to distinguish the view correctness of the echocardiogram from the image quality. Additionally, previous studies only provide a global image quality value, which limits their practical utility. In this work, we developed and compared three methods to estimate image quality: 1) classic pixel-based metrics like the generalized contrast-to-noise ratio (gCNR) on myocardial segments as region of interest and left ventricle lumen as background, obtained using a U-Net segmentation 2) local image coherence derived from a U-Net model that predicts coherence from B-Mode images 3) a deep convolutional network that predicts the quality of each region directly in an end-to-end fashion. We evaluate each method against manual regional image quality annotations by three experienced cardiologists. The results indicate poor performance of the gCNR metric, with Spearman correlation to the annotations of rho = 0.24. The end-to-end learning model obtains the best result, rho = 0.69, comparable to the inter-observer correlation, rho = 0.63. Finally, the coherence-based method, with rho = 0.58, outperformed the classical metrics and is more generic than the end-to-end approach.

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible but preventable blindness in working age populations. Color fundus photography (CFP) is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. However, its application to glaucoma has been limited to the computation of a few related biomarkers such as the vertical cup-to-disc ratio. Deep learning approaches, although widely applied for medical image analysis, have not been extensively used for glaucoma assessment due to the limited size of the available data sets. Furthermore, the lack of a standardize benchmark strategy makes difficult to compare existing methods in a uniform way. In order to overcome these issues we set up the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge, REFUGE (https://refuge.grand-challenge.org), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2018. The challenge consisted of two primary tasks, namely optic disc/cup segmentation and glaucoma classification. As part of REFUGE, we have publicly released a data set of 1200 fundus images with ground truth segmentations and clinical glaucoma labels, currently the largest existing one. We have also built an evaluation framework to ease and ensure fairness in the comparison of different models, encouraging the development of novel techniques in the field. 12 teams qualified and participated in the online challenge. This paper summarizes their methods and analyzes their corresponding results. In particular, we observed that two of the top-ranked teams outperformed two human experts in the glaucoma classification task. Furthermore, the segmentation results were in general consistent with the ground truth annotations, with complementary outcomes that can be further exploited by ensembling the results.

Segmentation of blood vessels in murine cerebral 3D OCTA images is foundational for in vivo quantitative analysis of the effects of neurovascular disorders, such as stroke or Alzheimer's, on the vascular network. However, to accurately segment blood vessels with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, a vast amount of voxel-level annotations is required. Since cerebral 3D OCTA images are typically plagued by artifacts and generally have a low signal-to-noise ratio, acquiring manual annotations poses an especially cumbersome and time-consuming task. To alleviate the need for manual annotations, we propose utilizing synthetic data to supervise segmentation algorithms. To this end, we extract patches from vessel graphs and transform them into synthetic cerebral 3D OCTA images paired with their matching ground truth labels by simulating the most dominant 3D OCTA artifacts. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results, enabling annotation-free blood vessel segmentation in cerebral 3D OCTA images.

With the advent of smartphone indirect ophthalmoscopy, teleophthalmology - the use of specialist ophthalmology assets at a distance from the patient - has experienced a breakthrough, promising enormous benefits especially for healthcare in distant, inaccessible or opthalmologically underserved areas, where specialists are either unavailable or too few in number. However, accurate teleophthalmology requires high-quality ophthalmoscopic imagery. This paper considers three feature families - statistical metrics, gradient-based metrics and wavelet transform coefficient derived indicators - as possible metrics to identify unsharp or blurry images. By using standard machine learning techniques, the suitability of these features for image quality assessment is confirmed, albeit on a rather small data set. With the increased availability and decreasing cost of digital ophthalmoscopy on one hand and the increased prevalence of diabetic retinopathy worldwide on the other, creating tools that can determine whether an image is likely to be diagnostically suitable can play a significant role in accelerating and streamlining the teleophthalmology process. This paper highlights the need for more research in this area, including the compilation of a diverse database of ophthalmoscopic imagery, annotated with quality markers, to train the Point of Acquisition error detection algorithms of the future.

Clinicians spend a significant amount of time reviewing medical images and transcribing their findings regarding patient diagnosis, referral and treatment in text form. Vision-language models (VLMs), which automatically interpret images and summarize their findings as text, have enormous potential to alleviate clinical workloads and increase patient access to high-quality medical care. While foundational models have stirred considerable interest in the medical community, it is unclear whether their general capabilities translate to real-world clinical utility. In this work, we show that foundation VLMs markedly underperform compared to practicing ophthalmologists on specialist tasks crucial to the care of patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). To address this, we initially identified the essential capabilities required for image-based clinical decision-making, and then developed a curriculum to selectively train VLMs in these skills. The resulting model, RetinaVLM, can be instructed to write reports that significantly outperform those written by leading foundation medical VLMs in disease staging (F1 score of 0.63 vs. 0.11) and patient referral (0.67 vs. 0.39), and approaches the diagnostic performance of junior ophthalmologists (who achieve 0.77 and 0.78 on the respective tasks). Furthermore, in a reader study involving two senior ophthalmologists with up to 32 years of experience, RetinaVLM's reports were found to be similarly correct (78.6% vs. 82.1%) and complete (both 78.6%) as reports written by junior ophthalmologists with up to 10 years of experience. These results demonstrate that our curriculum-based approach provides a blueprint for specializing generalist foundation medical VLMs to handle real-world clinical tasks.

In this work, we present MedImageInsight, an open-source medical imaging embedding model. MedImageInsight is trained on medical images with associated text and labels across a diverse collection of domains, including X-Ray, CT, MRI, dermoscopy, OCT, fundus photography, ultrasound, histopathology, and mammography. Rigorous evaluations demonstrate MedImageInsight's ability to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) or human expert level performance across classification, image-image search, and fine-tuning tasks. Specifically, on public datasets, MedImageInsight achieves SOTA in CT 3D medical image retrieval, as well as SOTA in disease classification and search for chest X-ray, dermatology, and OCT imaging. Furthermore, MedImageInsight achieves human expert performance in bone age estimation (on both public and partner data), as well as AUC above 0.9 in most other domains. When paired with a text decoder, MedImageInsight achieves near SOTA level single image report findings generation with less than 10\% the parameters of other models. Compared to fine-tuning GPT-4o with only MIMIC-CXR data for the same task, MedImageInsight outperforms in clinical metrics, but underperforms on lexical metrics where GPT-4o sets a new SOTA. Importantly for regulatory purposes, MedImageInsight can generate ROC curves, adjust sensitivity and specificity based on clinical need, and provide evidence-based decision support through image-image search (which can also enable retrieval augmented generation). In an independent clinical evaluation of image-image search in chest X-ray, MedImageInsight outperformed every other publicly available foundation model evaluated by large margins (over 6 points AUC), and significantly outperformed other models in terms of AI fairness (across age and gender). We hope releasing MedImageInsight will help enhance collective progress in medical imaging AI research and development.

The scarcity of high-quality, labelled retinal imaging data, which presents a significant challenge in the development of machine learning models for ophthalmology, hinders progress in the field. Existing methods for synthesising Colour Fundus Photographs (CFPs) largely rely on predefined disease labels, which restricts their ability to generate images that reflect fine-grained anatomical variations, subtle disease stages, and diverse pathological features beyond coarse class categories. To overcome these challenges, we first introduce an innovative pipeline that creates a large-scale, captioned retinal dataset comprising 1.4 million entries, called RetinaLogos-1400k. Specifically, RetinaLogos-1400k uses the visual language model(VLM) to describe retinal conditions and key structures, such as optic disc configuration, vascular distribution, nerve fibre layers, and pathological features. Building on this dataset, we employ a novel three-step training framework, RetinaLogos, which enables fine-grained semantic control over retinal images and accurately captures different stages of disease progression, subtle anatomical variations, and specific lesion types. Through extensive experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance across multiple datasets, with 62.07% of text-driven synthetic CFPs indistinguishable from real ones by ophthalmologists. Moreover, the synthetic data improves accuracy by 5%-10% in diabetic retinopathy grading and glaucoma detection. Codes are available at https://github.com/uni-medical/retina-text2cfp.

Many keypoint detection and description methods have been proposed for image matching or registration. While these methods demonstrate promising performance for single-modality image matching, they often struggle with multimodal data because the descriptors trained on single-modality data tend to lack robustness against the non-linear variations present in multimodal data. Extending such methods to multimodal image matching often requires well-aligned multimodal data to learn modality-invariant descriptors. However, acquiring such data is often costly and impractical in many real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a modality-invariant feature learning network (MIFNet) to compute modality-invariant features for keypoint descriptions in multimodal image matching using only single-modality training data. Specifically, we propose a novel latent feature aggregation module and a cumulative hybrid aggregation module to enhance the base keypoint descriptors trained on single-modality data by leveraging pre-trained features from Stable Diffusion models. We validate our method with recent keypoint detection and description methods in three multimodal retinal image datasets (CF-FA, CF-OCT, EMA-OCTA) and two remote sensing datasets (Optical-SAR and Optical-NIR). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MIFNet is able to learn modality-invariant feature for multimodal image matching without accessing the targeted modality and has good zero-shot generalization ability. The source code will be made publicly available.

Recent advancements in diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have revolutionized image processing, demonstrating significant potential in medical applications. Accurate segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) in echocardiograms is crucial for diagnostic procedures and necessary treatments. However, ultrasound images are notoriously noisy with low contrast and ambiguous LV boundaries, thereby complicating the segmentation process. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Echo-DND, a novel dual-noise diffusion model specifically designed for this task. Echo-DND leverages a unique combination of Gaussian and Bernoulli noises. It also incorporates a multi-scale fusion conditioning module to improve segmentation precision. Furthermore, it utilizes spatial coherence calibration to maintain spatial integrity in segmentation masks. The model's performance was rigorously validated on the CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic datasets. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing SOTA models. It achieves high Dice scores of 0.962 and 0.939 on these datasets, respectively. The proposed Echo-DND model establishes a new standard in echocardiogram segmentation, and its architecture holds promise for broader applicability in other medical imaging tasks, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy across various medical domains. Project page: https://abdur75648.github.io/Echo-DND

The need for improved diagnostic methods in ophthalmology is acute, especially in the underdeveloped regions with limited access to specialists and advanced equipment. Therefore, we introduce VisionUnite, a novel vision-language foundation model for ophthalmology enhanced with clinical knowledge. VisionUnite has been pretrained on an extensive dataset comprising 1.24 million image-text pairs, and further refined using our proposed MMFundus dataset, which includes 296,379 high-quality fundus image-text pairs and 889,137 simulated doctor-patient dialogue instances. Our experiments indicate that VisionUnite outperforms existing generative foundation models such as GPT-4V and Gemini Pro. It also demonstrates diagnostic capabilities comparable to junior ophthalmologists. VisionUnite performs well in various clinical scenarios including open-ended multi-disease diagnosis, clinical explanation, and patient interaction, making it a highly versatile tool for initial ophthalmic disease screening. VisionUnite can also serve as an educational aid for junior ophthalmologists, accelerating their acquisition of knowledge regarding both common and underrepresented ophthalmic conditions. VisionUnite represents a significant advancement in ophthalmology, with broad implications for diagnostics, medical education, and understanding of disease mechanisms. The source code is at https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/VisionUnite.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in medical image analysis. However, their capabilities in interpreting fundus images, a critical skill for ophthalmology, remain under-evaluated. Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained task divisions and fail to provide modular analysis of its two key modules, i.e., large language model (LLM) and vision encoder (VE). This paper introduces FunBench, a novel visual question answering (VQA) benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate MLLMs' fundus reading skills. FunBench features a hierarchical task organization across four levels (modality perception, anatomy perception, lesion analysis, and disease diagnosis). It also offers three targeted evaluation modes: linear-probe based VE evaluation, knowledge-prompted LLM evaluation, and holistic evaluation. Experiments on nine open-source MLLMs plus GPT-4o reveal significant deficiencies in fundus reading skills, particularly in basic tasks such as laterality recognition. The results highlight the limitations of current MLLMs and emphasize the need for domain-specific training and improved LLMs and VEs.

Deep learning is currently the state-of-the-art for automated detection of referable diabetic retinopathy (DR) from color fundus photographs (CFP). While the general interest is put on improving results through methodological innovations, it is not clear how good these approaches perform compared to standard deep classification models trained with the appropriate settings. In this paper we propose to model a strong baseline for this task based on a simple and standard ResNet-18 architecture. To this end, we built on top of prior art by training the model with a standard preprocessing strategy but using images from several public sources and an empirically calibrated data augmentation setting. To evaluate its performance, we covered multiple clinically relevant perspectives, including image and patient level DR screening, discriminating responses by input quality and DR grade, assessing model uncertainties and analyzing its results in a qualitative manner. With no other methodological innovation than a carefully designed training, our ResNet model achieved an AUC = 0.955 (0.953 - 0.956) on a combined test set of 61007 test images from different public datasets, which is in line or even better than what other more complex deep learning models reported in the literature. Similar AUC values were obtained in 480 images from two separate in-house databases specially prepared for this study, which emphasize its generalization ability. This confirms that standard networks can still be strong baselines for this task if properly trained.

Point-spread-function (PSF) engineering is a powerful computational imaging techniques wherein a custom phase mask is integrated into an optical system to encode additional information into captured images. Used in combination with deep learning, such systems now offer state-of-the-art performance at monocular depth estimation, extended depth-of-field imaging, lensless imaging, and other tasks. Inspired by recent advances in spatial light modulator (SLM) technology, this paper answers a natural question: Can one encode additional information and achieve superior performance by changing a phase mask dynamically over time? We first prove that the set of PSFs described by static phase masks is non-convex and that, as a result, time-averaged PSFs generated by dynamic phase masks are fundamentally more expressive. We then demonstrate, in simulation, that time-averaged dynamic (TiDy) phase masks can offer substantially improved monocular depth estimation and extended depth-of-field imaging performance.

Fluorescence LiDAR (FLiDAR), a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology employed for distance and depth estimation across medical, automotive, and other fields, encounters significant computational challenges in scattering media. The complex nature of the acquired FLiDAR signal, particularly in such environments, makes isolating photon time-of-flight (related to target depth) and intrinsic fluorescence lifetime exceptionally difficult, thus limiting the effectiveness of current analytical and computational methodologies. To overcome this limitation, we present a Physics-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework tailored for specialized modeling of diverse temporal components. In contrast to the conventional MoE approaches our expert models are informed by underlying physics, such as the radiative transport equation governing photon propagation in scattering media. Central to our approach is EvidenceMoE, which integrates Evidence-Based Dirichlet Critics (EDCs). These critic models assess the reliability of each expert's output by providing per-expert quality scores and corrective feedback. A Decider Network then leverages this information to fuse expert predictions into a robust final estimate adaptively. We validate our method using realistically simulated Fluorescence LiDAR (FLiDAR) data for non-invasive cancer cell depth detection generated from photon transport models in tissue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance, achieving a normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) of 0.030 for depth estimation and 0.074 for fluorescence lifetime.

WHO has declared that more than 2.2 billion people worldwide are suffering from visual disorders, such as media haze, glaucoma, and drusen. At least 1 billion of these cases could have been either prevented or successfully treated, yet they remain unaddressed due to poverty, a lack of specialists, inaccurate ocular fundus diagnoses by ophthalmologists, or the presence of a rare disease. To address this, the research has developed the Hybrid Trio-Network Model Algorithm for accurately diagnosing 12 distinct common and rare eye diseases. This algorithm utilized the RFMiD dataset of 3,200 fundus images and the Binary Relevance Method to detect diseases separately, ensuring expandability and avoiding incorrect correlations. Each detector, incorporating finely tuned hyperparameters to optimize performance, consisted of three feature components: A classical transfer learning CNN model, a two-stage CNN model, and a Siamese Network. The diagnosis was made using features extracted through this Trio-Model with Ensembled Machine Learning algorithms. The proposed model achieved an average accuracy of 97% and an AUC score of 0.96. Compared to past benchmark studies, an increase of over 10% in the F1-score was observed for most diseases. Furthermore, using the Siamese Network, the model successfully made predictions in diseases like optic disc pallor, which past studies failed to predict due to low confidence. This diagnostic tool presents a stable, adaptive, cost-effective, efficient, accessible, and fast solution for globalizing early detection of both common and rare diseases.

Recent efforts at scaling computer vision models have established Vision Transformers (ViTs) as the leading architecture. ViTs incorporate weight sharing over image patches as an important inductive bias. In this work, we show that ViTs benefit from incorporating equivariance under the octic group, i.e., reflections and 90-degree rotations, as a further inductive bias. We develop new architectures, octic ViTs, that use octic-equivariant layers and put them to the test on both supervised and self-supervised learning. Through extensive experiments on DeiT-III and DINOv2 training on ImageNet-1K, we show that octic ViTs yield more computationally efficient networks while also improving performance. In particular, we achieve approximately 40% reduction in FLOPs for ViT-H while simultaneously improving both classification and segmentation results.

Echocardiography has been a prominent tool for the diagnosis of cardiac disease. However, these diagnoses can be heavily impeded by poor image quality. Acoustic clutter emerges due to multipath reflections imposed by layers of skin, subcutaneous fat, and intercostal muscle between the transducer and heart. As a result, haze and other noise artifacts pose a real challenge to cardiac ultrasound imaging. In many cases, especially with difficult-to-image patients such as patients with obesity, a diagnosis from B-Mode ultrasound imaging is effectively rendered unusable, forcing sonographers to resort to contrast-enhanced ultrasound examinations or refer patients to other imaging modalities. Tissue harmonic imaging has been a popular approach to combat haze, but in severe cases is still heavily impacted by haze. Alternatively, denoising algorithms are typically unable to remove highly structured and correlated noise, such as haze. It remains a challenge to accurately describe the statistical properties of structured haze, and develop an inference method to subsequently remove it. Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative models and have shown their effectiveness in a variety of inverse problems. In this work, we present a joint posterior sampling framework that combines two separate diffusion models to model the distribution of both clean ultrasound and haze in an unsupervised manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate techniques for effectively training diffusion models on radio-frequency ultrasound data and highlight the advantages over image data. Experiments on both in-vitro and in-vivo cardiac datasets show that the proposed dehazing method effectively removes haze while preserving signals from weakly reflected tissue.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a growing health problem worldwide and is a leading cause of visual impairment and blindness, especially among working people aged 20-65. Its incidence is increasing along with the number of diabetes cases, and it is more common in developed countries than in developing countries. Recent research in the field of diabetic retinopathy diagnosis is using advanced technologies, such as analysis of images obtained by ophthalmoscopy. Automatic methods for analyzing eye images based on neural networks, deep learning and image analysis algorithms can improve the efficiency of diagnosis. This paper describes an automatic DR diagnosis method that includes processing and analysis of ophthalmoscopic images of the eye. It uses morphological algorithms to identify the optic disc and lesions characteristic of DR, such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages and exudates. Automated DR diagnosis has the potential to improve the efficiency of early detection of this disease and contribute to reducing the number of cases of diabetes-related visual impairment. The final step was to create an application with a graphical user interface that allowed retinal images taken at cooperating ophthalmology offices to be uploaded to the server. These images were then analyzed using a developed algorithm to make a diagnosis.

Scarcity of large publicly available retinal fundus image datasets for automated glaucoma detection has been the bottleneck for successful application of artificial intelligence towards practical Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD). A few small datasets that are available for research community usually suffer from impractical image capturing conditions and stringent inclusion criteria. These shortcomings in already limited choice of existing datasets make it challenging to mature a CAD system so that it can perform in real-world environment. In this paper we present a large publicly available retinal fundus image dataset for glaucoma classification called G1020. The dataset is curated by conforming to standard practices in routine ophthalmology and it is expected to serve as standard benchmark dataset for glaucoma detection. This database consists of 1020 high resolution colour fundus images and provides ground truth annotations for glaucoma diagnosis, optic disc and optic cup segmentation, vertical cup-to-disc ratio, size of neuroretinal rim in inferior, superior, nasal and temporal quadrants, and bounding box location for optic disc. We also report baseline results by conducting extensive experiments for automated glaucoma diagnosis and segmentation of optic disc and optic cup.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities with reinforcement learning paradigm. Although several multimodal reasoning models have been explored in the medical domain, most of them focus exclusively on basic reasoning, which refers to shallow inference based on visual feature matching. However, real-world clinical diagnosis extends beyond basic reasoning, demanding reasoning processes that integrate heterogeneous clinical information (such as chief complaints and medical history) with multimodal medical imaging data. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Retinal-Reason, the first ophthalmic multimodal dataset with the full spectrum of perception and reasoning. It encompasses both basic reasoning tasks and complex reasoning tasks, aiming to enhance visual-centric fundamental reasoning capabilities and emulate realistic clinical thinking patterns. Building upon MM-Retinal-Reason, we propose OphthaReason, the first ophthalmology-specific multimodal reasoning model with step-by-step reasoning traces. To enable flexible adaptation to both basic and complex reasoning tasks, we specifically design a novel method called Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Thinking (UADT), which estimates sample-level uncertainty via entropy and dynamically modulates the model's exploration depth using a shaped advantage mechanism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both basic and complex reasoning tasks, outperforming general-purpose MLLMs, medical MLLMs, RL-based medical MLLMs, and ophthalmic MLLMs by at least 24.92\%, 15.00\%, 21.20\%, and 17.66\%. Project Page: https://github.com/lxirich/OphthaReason{link}.

Recent research in medical image analysis with deep learning almost exclusively focuses on grid- or voxel-based data representations. We challenge this common choice by introducing MedFuncta, a modality-agnostic continuous data representation based on neural fields. We demonstrate how to scale neural fields from single instances to large datasets by exploiting redundancy in medical signals and by applying an efficient meta-learning approach with a context reduction scheme. We further address the spectral bias in commonly used SIREN activations, by introducing an omega_0-schedule, improving reconstruction quality and convergence speed. We validate our proposed approach on a large variety of medical signals of different dimensions and modalities (1D: ECG; 2D: Chest X-ray, Retinal OCT, Fundus Camera, Dermatoscope, Colon Histopathology, Cell Microscopy; 3D: Brain MRI, Lung CT) and successfully demonstrate that we can solve relevant downstream tasks on these representations. We additionally release a large-scale dataset of > 550k annotated neural fields to promote research in this direction.

A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in computer vision. However, a limited number of annotated data is very common, especially in ophthalmic image analysis, since manual annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods bring huge opportunities for better utilizing unlabeled data, as they do not need massive annotations. With an attempt to use as many as possible unlabeled ophthalmic images, it is necessary to break the dimension barrier, simultaneously making use of both 2D and 3D images. In this paper, we propose a universal self-supervised Transformer framework, named Uni4Eye, to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding in ophthalmic images. Uni4Eye can serve as a global feature extractor, which builds its basis on a Masked Image Modeling task with a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. We employ a Unified Patch Embedding module to replace the origin patch embedding module in ViT for jointly processing both 2D and 3D input images. Besides, we design a dual-branch multitask decoder module to simultaneously perform two reconstruction tasks on the input image and its gradient map, delivering discriminative representations for better convergence. We evaluate the performance of our pre-trained Uni4Eye encoder by fine-tuning it on six downstream ophthalmic image classification tasks. The superiority of Uni4Eye is successfully established through comparisons to other state-of-the-art SSL pre-training methods.

With the rapid development of COVID-19 into a global pandemic, there is an ever more urgent need for cheap, fast and reliable tools that can assist physicians in diagnosing COVID-19. Medical imaging such as CT can take a key role in complementing conventional diagnostic tools from molecular biology, and, using deep learning techniques, several automatic systems were demonstrated promising performances using CT or X-ray data. Here, we advocate a more prominent role of point-of-care ultrasound imaging to guide COVID-19 detection. Ultrasound is non-invasive and ubiquitous in medical facilities around the globe. Our contribution is threefold. First, we gather a lung ultrasound (POCUS) dataset consisting of 1103 images (654 COVID-19, 277 bacterial pneumonia and 172 healthy controls), sampled from 64 videos. This dataset was assembled from various online sources, processed specifically for deep learning models and is intended to serve as a starting point for an open-access initiative. Second, we train a deep convolutional neural network (POCOVID-Net) on this 3-class dataset and achieve an accuracy of 89% and, by a majority vote, a video accuracy of 92% . For detecting COVID-19 in particular, the model performs with a sensitivity of 0.96, a specificity of 0.79 and F1-score of 0.92 in a 5-fold cross validation. Third, we provide an open-access web service (POCOVIDScreen) that is available at: https://pocovidscreen.org. The website deploys the predictive model, allowing to perform predictions on ultrasound lung images. In addition, it grants medical staff the option to (bulk) upload their own screenings in order to contribute to the growing public database of pathological lung ultrasound images. Dataset and code are available from: https://github.com/jannisborn/covid19_pocus_ultrasound. NOTE: This preprint is superseded by our paper in Applied Sciences: https://doi.org/10.3390/app11020672

The retina is the only part of the human body in which blood vessels can be accessed non-invasively using imaging techniques such as digital fundus images (DFI). The spatial distribution of the retinal microvasculature may change with cardiovascular diseases and thus the eyes may be regarded as a window to our hearts. Computerized segmentation of the retinal arterioles and venules (A/V) is essential for automated microvasculature analysis. Using active learning, we created a new DFI dataset containing 240 crowd-sourced manual A/V segmentations performed by fifteen medical students and reviewed by an ophthalmologist, and developed LUNet, a novel deep learning architecture for high resolution A/V segmentation. LUNet architecture includes a double dilated convolutional block that aims to enhance the receptive field of the model and reduce its parameter count. Furthermore, LUNet has a long tail that operates at high resolution to refine the segmentation. The custom loss function emphasizes the continuity of the blood vessels. LUNet is shown to significantly outperform two state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms on the local test set as well as on four external test sets simulating distribution shifts across ethnicity, comorbidities, and annotators. We make the newly created dataset open access (upon publication).

Controlling the COVID-19 pandemic largely hinges upon the existence of fast, safe, and highly-available diagnostic tools. Ultrasound, in contrast to CT or X-Ray, has many practical advantages and can serve as a globally-applicable first-line examination technique. We provide the largest publicly available lung ultrasound (US) dataset for COVID-19 consisting of 106 videos from three classes (COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia, and healthy controls); curated and approved by medical experts. On this dataset, we perform an in-depth study of the value of deep learning methods for differential diagnosis of COVID-19. We propose a frame-based convolutional neural network that correctly classifies COVID-19 US videos with a sensitivity of 0.98+-0.04 and a specificity of 0.91+-08 (frame-based sensitivity 0.93+-0.05, specificity 0.87+-0.07). We further employ class activation maps for the spatio-temporal localization of pulmonary biomarkers, which we subsequently validate for human-in-the-loop scenarios in a blindfolded study with medical experts. Aiming for scalability and robustness, we perform ablation studies comparing mobile-friendly, frame- and video-based architectures and show reliability of the best model by aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty estimates. We hope to pave the road for a community effort toward an accessible, efficient and interpretable screening method and we have started to work on a clinical validation of the proposed method. Data and code are publicly available.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical image processing, deep learning in color fundus photography (CFP) analysis is also evolving. Although there are some open-source, labeled datasets of CFPs in the ophthalmology community, large-scale datasets for screening only have labels of disease categories, and datasets with annotations of fundus structures are usually small in size. In addition, labeling standards are not uniform across datasets, and there is no clear information on the acquisition device. Here we release a multi-annotation, multi-quality, and multi-device color fundus image dataset for glaucoma analysis on an original challenge -- Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge 2nd Edition (REFUGE2). The REFUGE2 dataset contains 2000 color fundus images with annotations of glaucoma classification, optic disc/cup segmentation, as well as fovea localization. Meanwhile, the REFUGE2 challenge sets three sub-tasks of automatic glaucoma diagnosis and fundus structure analysis and provides an online evaluation framework. Based on the characteristics of multi-device and multi-quality data, some methods with strong generalizations are provided in the challenge to make the predictions more robust. This shows that REFUGE2 brings attention to the characteristics of real-world multi-domain data, bridging the gap between scientific research and clinical application.

Brain MRI scans are often found in four modalities, consisting of T1-weighted with and without contrast enhancement (T1ce and T1w), T2-weighted imaging (T2w), and Flair. Leveraging complementary information from these different modalities enables models to learn richer, more discriminative features for understanding brain anatomy, which could be used in downstream tasks such as anomaly detection. However, in clinical practice, not all MRI modalities are always available due to various reasons. This makes missing modality generation a critical challenge in medical image analysis. In this paper, we propose SLaM-DiMM, a novel missing modality generation framework that harnesses the power of diffusion models to synthesize any of the four target MRI modalities from other available modalities. Our approach not only generates high-fidelity images but also ensures structural coherence across the depth of the volume through a dedicated coherence enhancement mechanism. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the BraTS-Lighthouse-2025 Challenge dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in synthesizing anatomically plausible and structurally consistent results. Code is available at https://github.com/BheeshmSharma/SLaM-DiMM-MICCAI-BraTS-Challenge-2025.

In some medical imaging tasks and other settings where only small parts of the image are informative for the classification task, traditional CNNs can sometimes struggle to generalise. Manually annotated Regions of Interest (ROI) are sometimes used to isolate the most informative parts of the image. However, these are expensive to collect and may vary significantly across annotators. To overcome these issues, we propose a framework that employs saliency maps to obtain soft spatial attention masks that modulate the image features at different scales. We refer to our method as Adversarial Counterfactual Attention (ACAT). ACAT increases the baseline classification accuracy of lesions in brain CT scans from 71.39% to 72.55% and of COVID-19 related findings in lung CT scans from 67.71% to 70.84% and exceeds the performance of competing methods. We investigate the best way to generate the saliency maps employed in our architecture and propose a way to obtain them from adversarially generated counterfactual images. They are able to isolate the area of interest in brain and lung CT scans without using any manual annotations. In the task of localising the lesion location out of 6 possible regions, they obtain a score of 65.05% on brain CT scans, improving the score of 61.29% obtained with the best competing method.

Deep learning has become the state-of-the-art approach to medical tomographic imaging. A common approach is to feed the result of a simple inversion, for example the backprojection, to a multiscale convolutional neural network (CNN) which computes the final reconstruction. Despite good results on in-distribution test data, this often results in overfitting certain large-scale structures and poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Moreover, the memory and computational complexity of multiscale CNNs scale unfavorably with image resolution, making them impractical for application at realistic clinical resolutions. In this paper, we introduce Glimpse, a local coordinate-based neural network for computed tomography which reconstructs a pixel value by processing only the measurements associated with the neighborhood of the pixel. Glimpse significantly outperforms successful CNNs on OOD samples, while achieving comparable or better performance on in-distribution test data and maintaining a memory footprint almost independent of image resolution; 5GB memory suffices to train on 1024x1024 images which is orders of magnitude less than CNNs. Glimpse is fully differentiable and can be used plug-and-play in arbitrary deep learning architectures, enabling feats such as correcting miscalibrated projection orientations. Our implementation and Google Colab demo can be accessed at https://github.com/swing-research/Glimpse.

In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training Framework that synergistically combines X-rays, electrocardiograms (ECGs), and radiology/cardiology reports. Our approach leverages transformers to encode these diverse modalities into a unified representation space, aiming to enhance diagnostic accuracy and facilitate comprehensive patient assessments. We utilize LoRA-Peft to significantly reduce trainable parameters in the LLM and incorporate recent linear attention dropping strategy in the Vision Transformer(ViT) for smoother attention. Furthermore, we provide novel multimodal attention explanations and retrieval for our model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an integrated model that combines X-ray, ECG, and Radiology/Cardiology Report with this approach. By utilizing contrastive loss, MoRE effectively aligns modality-specific features into a coherent embedding, which supports various downstream tasks such as zero-shot classification and multimodal retrieval. Employing our proposed methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Mimic-IV, CheXpert, Edema Severity, and PtbXl downstream datasets, surpassing existing multimodal approaches. Our proposed framework shows significant improvements in capturing intricate inter-modal relationships and its robustness in medical diagnosis that establishes a framework for future research in multimodal learning in the healthcare sector.

In ophthalmic surgery, developing an AI system capable of interpreting surgical videos and predicting subsequent operations requires numerous ophthalmic surgical videos with high-quality annotations, which are difficult to collect due to privacy concerns and labor consumption. Text-guided video generation (T2V) emerges as a promising solution to overcome this issue by generating ophthalmic surgical videos based on surgeon instructions. In this paper, we present Ophora, a pioneering model that can generate ophthalmic surgical videos following natural language instructions. To construct Ophora, we first propose a Comprehensive Data Curation pipeline to convert narrative ophthalmic surgical videos into a large-scale, high-quality dataset comprising over 160K video-instruction pairs, Ophora-160K. Then, we propose a Progressive Video-Instruction Tuning scheme to transfer rich spatial-temporal knowledge from a T2V model pre-trained on natural video-text datasets for privacy-preserved ophthalmic surgical video generation based on Ophora-160K. Experiments on video quality evaluation via quantitative analysis and ophthalmologist feedback demonstrate that Ophora can generate realistic and reliable ophthalmic surgical videos based on surgeon instructions. We also validate the capability of Ophora for empowering downstream tasks of ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/mar-cry/Ophora.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in the general field of image processing. Their emerging task generalization and freeform conversational capabilities can greatly facilitate medical diagnostic assistance, helping patients better understand their conditions and enhancing doctor-patient trust. Computed Tomography (CT) is a non-invasive imaging technique used to capture the internal mechanisms of a patient's condition and is widely utilized. However, in past research, the complex textural features of this imaging data have made accurate interpretation by algorithms challenging, impeding the performance of general LLMs in diagnostic assistance. To address this, we developed OrthoDoc, a MLLM designed for CT diagnostics. OrthoDoc is trained on 120,000 CT images and diagnostic reports and includes a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module capable of effectively mitigating model hallucinations. This module is informed by extensive medical literature, textbooks, and explanatory data. Thus, OrthoDoc not only processes complex CT images but also stores, understands, and reasons over medical knowledge and language. In extensive experiments, OrthoDoc outperforms commercial models led by GPT-4, demonstrating superior diagnostic capabilities and accuracy. Specifically, OrthoDoc significantly surpasses existing models in the diagnosis of common orthopedic conditions such as fractures, arthritis, and tumors. Additionally, OrthoDoc exhibits robust generalization and stability when handling rare and complex cases.

Foundation vision-language models are currently transforming computer vision, and are on the rise in medical imaging fueled by their very promising generalization capabilities. However, the initial attempts to transfer this new paradigm to medical imaging have shown less impressive performances than those observed in other domains, due to the significant domain shift and the complex, expert domain knowledge inherent to medical-imaging tasks. Motivated by the need for domain-expert foundation models, we present FLAIR, a pre-trained vision-language model for universal retinal fundus image understanding. To this end, we compiled 37 open-access, mostly categorical fundus imaging datasets from various sources, with up to 97 different target conditions and 284,660 images. We integrate the expert's domain knowledge in the form of descriptive textual prompts, during both pre-training and zero-shot inference, enhancing the less-informative categorical supervision of the data. Such a textual expert's knowledge, which we compiled from the relevant clinical literature and community standards, describes the fine-grained features of the pathologies as well as the hierarchies and dependencies between them. We report comprehensive evaluations, which illustrate the benefit of integrating expert knowledge and the strong generalization capabilities of FLAIR under difficult scenarios with domain shifts or unseen categories. When adapted with a lightweight linear probe, FLAIR outperforms fully-trained, dataset-focused models, more so in the few-shot regimes. Interestingly, FLAIR outperforms by a large margin more generalist, larger-scale image-language models, which emphasizes the potential of embedding experts' domain knowledge and the limitations of generalist models in medical imaging.

Different medical imaging modalities capture diagnostic information at varying spatial resolutions, from coarse global patterns to fine-grained localized structures. However, most existing vision-language frameworks in the medical domain apply a uniform strategy for local feature extraction, overlooking the modality-specific demands. In this work, we present MedMoE, a modular and extensible vision-language processing framework that dynamically adapts visual representation based on the diagnostic context. MedMoE incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module conditioned on the report type, which routes multi-scale image features through specialized expert branches trained to capture modality-specific visual semantics. These experts operate over feature pyramids derived from a Swin Transformer backbone, enabling spatially adaptive attention to clinically relevant regions. This framework produces localized visual representations aligned with textual descriptions, without requiring modality-specific supervision at inference. Empirical results on diverse medical benchmarks demonstrate that MedMoE improves alignment and retrieval performance across imaging modalities, underscoring the value of modality-specialized visual representations in clinical vision-language systems.

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate significant potential in the field of medical diagnosis. However, they face critical challenges in specialized domains such as ophthalmology, particularly the fragmentation of annotation granularity and inconsistencies in clinical reasoning logic, which hinder precise cross-modal understanding. This paper introduces FundusExpert, an ophthalmology-specific MLLM with integrated positioning-diagnosis reasoning capabilities, along with FundusGen, a dataset constructed through the intelligent Fundus-Engine system. Fundus-Engine automates localization and leverages MLLM-based semantic expansion to integrate global disease classification, local object detection, and fine-grained feature analysis within a single fundus image. Additionally, by constructing a clinically aligned cognitive chain, it guides the model to generate interpretable reasoning paths. FundusExpert, fine-tuned with instruction data from FundusGen, achieves the best performance in ophthalmic question-answering tasks, surpassing the average accuracy of the 40B MedRegA by 26.6%. It also excels in zero-shot report generation tasks, achieving a clinical consistency of 77.0%, significantly outperforming GPT-4o's 47.6%. Furthermore, we reveal a scaling law between data quality and model capability (L propto N^{0.068}), demonstrating that the cognitive alignment annotations in FundusGen enhance data utilization efficiency. By integrating region-level localization with diagnostic reasoning chains, our work develops a scalable, clinically-aligned MLLM and explores a pathway toward bridging the visual-language gap in specific MLLMs. Our project can be found at https://github.com/MeteorElf/FundusExpert.

Single-view depth estimation can be remarkably effective if there is enough ground-truth depth data for supervised training. However, there are scenarios, especially in medicine in the case of endoscopies, where such data cannot be obtained. In such cases, multi-view self-supervision and synthetic-to-real transfer serve as alternative approaches, however, with a considerable performance reduction in comparison to supervised case. Instead, we propose a single-view self-supervised method that achieves a performance similar to the supervised case. In some medical devices, such as endoscopes, the camera and light sources are co-located at a small distance from the target surfaces. Thus, we can exploit that, for any given albedo and surface orientation, pixel brightness is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the surface, providing a strong single-view self-supervisory signal. In our experiments, our self-supervised models deliver accuracies comparable to those of fully supervised ones, while being applicable without depth ground-truth data.

Sagnac Speed Meter and ring resonators can be used as high precision instruments, but they are limited in their sensitivity through scattered light causing non-linear noise. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a technique called Tunable Coherence, where the long coherence length of the laser is broken in a controlled way, to suppress the coupling of scattered light in a Sagnac interferometer. We demonstrate a scattered light suppression of 24.2 dB in a Sagnac interferometer and discuss the experimental limitations. Further, we show an analytical discussion on how Tunable Coherence could be a fundamental solution to light scattering back from optical surfaces into the counter propagating beam, which is an issue particularly in ring resonators.

Medical imaging provides critical evidence for clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical decisions, yet most existing imaging models are narrowly focused and require multiple specialized networks, limiting their generalization. Although large-scale language and multimodal models exhibit strong reasoning and multi-task capabilities, real-world clinical applications demand precise visual grounding, multimodal integration, and chain-of-thought reasoning. We introduce Citrus-V, a multimodal medical foundation model that combines image analysis with textual reasoning. The model integrates detection, segmentation, and multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning, enabling pixel-level lesion localization, structured report generation, and physician-like diagnostic inference in a single framework. We propose a novel multimodal training approach and release a curated open-source data suite covering reasoning, detection, segmentation, and document understanding tasks. Evaluations demonstrate that Citrus-V outperforms existing open-source medical models and expert-level imaging systems across multiple benchmarks, delivering a unified pipeline from visual grounding to clinical reasoning and supporting precise lesion quantification, automated reporting, and reliable second opinions.

Previous research on retinal vessel segmentation is targeted at a specific image domain, mostly color fundus photography (CFP). In this paper we make a brave attempt to attack a more challenging task of broad-domain retinal vessel segmentation (BD-RVS), which is to develop a unified model applicable to varied domains including CFP, SLO, UWF, OCTA and FFA. To that end, we propose Dual Convoltuional Prompting (DCP) that learns to extract domain-specific features by localized prompting along both position and channel dimensions. DCP is designed as a plug-in module that can effectively turn a R2AU-Net based vessel segmentation network to a unified model, yet without the need of modifying its network structure. For evaluation we build a broad-domain set using five public domain-specific datasets including ROSSA, FIVES, IOSTAR, PRIME-FP20 and VAMPIRE. In order to benchmark BD-RVS on the broad-domain dataset, we re-purpose a number of existing methods originally developed in other contexts, producing eight baseline methods in total. Extensive experiments show the the proposed method compares favorably against the baselines for BD-RVS.

Understanding radiologists' eye movement during Computed Tomography (CT) reading is crucial for developing effective interpretable computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, CT research in this area has been limited by the lack of publicly available eye-tracking datasets and the three-dimensional complexity of CT volumes. To address these challenges, we present the first publicly available eye gaze dataset on CT, called CT-ScanGaze. Then, we introduce CT-Searcher, a novel 3D scanpath predictor designed specifically to process CT volumes and generate radiologist-like 3D fixation sequences, overcoming the limitations of current scanpath predictors that only handle 2D inputs. Since deep learning models benefit from a pretraining step, we develop a pipeline that converts existing 2D gaze datasets into 3D gaze data to pretrain CT-Searcher. Through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on CT-ScanGaze, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and provide a comprehensive assessment framework for 3D scanpath prediction in medical imaging.

Ensuring the quality and integrity of medical images is crucial for maintaining diagnostic accuracy in deep learning-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) systems. Covariate shifts are subtle variations in the data distribution caused by different imaging devices or settings and can severely degrade model performance, similar to the effects of adversarial attacks. Therefore, it is vital to have a lightweight and fast method to assess the quality of these images prior to using CAD models. AdverX-Ray addresses this need by serving as an image-quality assessment layer, designed to detect covariate shifts effectively. This Adversarial Variational Autoencoder prioritizes the discriminator's role, using the suboptimal outputs of the generator as negative samples to fine-tune the discriminator's ability to identify high-frequency artifacts. Images generated by adversarial networks often exhibit severe high-frequency artifacts, guiding the discriminator to focus excessively on these components. This makes the discriminator ideal for this approach. Trained on patches from X-ray images of specific machine models, AdverX-Ray can evaluate whether a scan matches the training distribution, or if a scan from the same machine is captured under different settings. Extensive comparisons with various OOD detection methods show that AdverX-Ray significantly outperforms existing techniques, achieving a 96.2% average AUROC using only 64 random patches from an X-ray. Its lightweight and fast architecture makes it suitable for real-time applications, enhancing the reliability of medical imaging systems. The code and pretrained models are publicly available.

Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) -- using a small number of projections for tomographic reconstruction -- enables much lower radiation dose to patients and accelerated data acquisition. The reconstructed images, however, suffer from strong artifacts, greatly limiting their diagnostic value. Current trends for sparse-view CT turn to the raw data for better information recovery. The resultant dual-domain methods, nonetheless, suffer from secondary artifacts, especially in ultra-sparse view scenarios, and their generalization to other scanners/protocols is greatly limited. A crucial question arises: have the image post-processing methods reached the limit? Our answer is not yet. In this paper, we stick to image post-processing methods due to great flexibility and propose global representation (GloRe) distillation framework for sparse-view CT, termed GloReDi. First, we propose to learn GloRe with Fourier convolution, so each element in GloRe has an image-wide receptive field. Second, unlike methods that only use the full-view images for supervision, we propose to distill GloRe from intermediate-view reconstructed images that are readily available but not explored in previous literature. The success of GloRe distillation is attributed to two key components: representation directional distillation to align the GloRe directions, and band-pass-specific contrastive distillation to gain clinically important details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GloReDi over the state-of-the-art methods, including dual-domain ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/longzilicart/GloReDi.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is highly contagious with limited treatment options. Early and accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 is crucial in reducing the spread of the disease and its accompanied mortality. Currently, detection by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the gold standard of outpatient and inpatient detection of Covid-19. RT-PCR is a rapid method, however, its accuracy in detection is only ~70-75%. Another approved strategy is computed tomography (CT) imaging. CT imaging has a much higher sensitivity of ~80-98%, but similar accuracy of 70%. To enhance the accuracy of CT imaging detection, we developed an open-source set of algorithms called CovidCTNet that successfully differentiates Covid-19 from community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and other lung diseases. CovidCTNet increases the accuracy of CT imaging detection to 90% compared to radiologists (70%). The model is designed to work with heterogeneous and small sample sizes independent of the CT imaging hardware. In order to facilitate the detection of Covid-19 globally and assist radiologists and physicians in the screening process, we are releasing all algorithms and parametric details in an open-source format. Open-source sharing of our CovidCTNet enables developers to rapidly improve and optimize services, while preserving user privacy and data ownership.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in working-age adults. While screening reduces the risk of blindness, traditional imaging is often costly and inaccessible. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms present a scalable diagnostic solution, but concerns regarding fairness and generalization persist. This work evaluates the fairness and performance of image-trained models in DR prediction, as well as the impact of disentanglement as a bias mitigation technique, using the diverse mBRSET fundus dataset. Three models, ConvNeXt V2, DINOv2, and Swin V2, were trained on macula images to predict DR and sensitive attributes (SAs) (e.g., age and gender/sex). Fairness was assessed between subgroups of SAs, and disentanglement was applied to reduce bias. All models achieved high DR prediction performance in diagnosing (up to 94% AUROC) and could reasonably predict age and gender/sex (91% and 77% AUROC, respectively). Fairness assessment suggests disparities, such as a 10% AUROC gap between age groups in DINOv2. Disentangling SAs from DR prediction had varying results, depending on the model selected. Disentanglement improved DINOv2 performance (2% AUROC gain), but led to performance drops in ConvNeXt V2 and Swin V2 (7% and 3%, respectively). These findings highlight the complexity of disentangling fine-grained features in fundus imaging and emphasize the importance of fairness in medical imaging AI to ensure equitable and reliable healthcare solutions.

The progress in generative models, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), opened new possibilities for image generation but raised concerns about potential malicious uses, especially in sensitive areas like medical imaging. This study introduces MITS-GAN, a novel approach to prevent tampering in medical images, with a specific focus on CT scans. The approach disrupts the output of the attacker's CT-GAN architecture by introducing finely tuned perturbations that are imperceptible to the human eye. Specifically, the proposed approach involves the introduction of appropriate Gaussian noise to the input as a protective measure against various attacks. Our method aims to enhance tamper resistance, comparing favorably to existing techniques. Experimental results on a CT scan demonstrate MITS-GAN's superior performance, emphasizing its ability to generate tamper-resistant images with negligible artifacts. As image tampering in medical domains poses life-threatening risks, our proactive approach contributes to the responsible and ethical use of generative models. This work provides a foundation for future research in countering cyber threats in medical imaging. Models and codes are publicly available on https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/MITS-GAN-2024/.

Conventional Computed Tomography (CT) methods require large numbers of noise-free projections for accurate density reconstructions, limiting their applicability to the more complex class of Cone Beam Geometry CT (CBCT) reconstruction. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to overcome these limitations, with methods based on neural fields (NF) showing strong performance, by approximating the reconstructed density through a continuous-in-space coordinate based neural network. Our focus is on improving such methods, however, unlike previous work, which requires training an NF from scratch for each new set of projections, we instead propose to leverage anatomical consistencies over different scans by training a single conditional NF on a dataset of projections. We propose a novel conditioning method where local modulations are modeled per patient as a field over the input domain through a Neural Modulation Field (NMF). The resulting Conditional Cone Beam Neural Tomography (CondCBNT) shows improved performance for both high and low numbers of available projections on noise-free and noisy data.

The emergence of powerful, general-purpose omnimodels capable of processing diverse data modalities has raised a critical question: can these ``jack-of-all-trades'' systems perform on par with highly specialized models in knowledge-intensive domains? This work investigates this question within the high-stakes field of medical image segmentation. We conduct a comparative study analyzing the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art omnimodel (Gemini 2.5 Pro, the ``Nano Banana'' model) against domain-specific deep learning models on three distinct tasks: polyp (endoscopy), retinal vessel (fundus), and breast tumor segmentation (ultrasound). Our study focuses on performance at the extremes by curating subsets of the ``easiest'' and ``hardest'' cases based on the specialist models' accuracy. Our findings reveal a nuanced and task-dependent landscape. For polyp and breast tumor segmentation, specialist models excel on easy samples, but the omnimodel demonstrates greater robustness on hard samples where specialists fail catastrophically. Conversely, for the fine-grained task of retinal vessel segmentation, the specialist model maintains superior performance across both easy and hard cases. Intriguingly, qualitative analysis suggests omnimodels may possess higher sensitivity, identifying subtle anatomical features missed by human annotators. Our results indicate that while current omnimodels are not yet a universal replacement for specialists, their unique strengths suggest a potential complementary role with specialist models, particularly in enhancing robustness on challenging edge cases.

Introduction: Blood vessels can be non-invasively visualized from a digital fundus image (DFI). Several studies have shown an association between cardiovascular risk and vascular features obtained from DFI. Recent advances in computer vision and image segmentation enable automatising DFI blood vessel segmentation. There is a need for a resource that can automatically compute digital vasculature biomarkers (VBM) from these segmented DFI. Methods: In this paper, we introduce a Python Vasculature BioMarker toolbox, denoted PVBM. A total of 11 VBMs were implemented. In particular, we introduce new algorithmic methods to estimate tortuosity and branching angles. Using PVBM, and as a proof of usability, we analyze geometric vascular differences between glaucomatous patients and healthy controls. Results: We built a fully automated vasculature biomarker toolbox based on DFI segmentations and provided a proof of usability to characterize the vascular changes in glaucoma. For arterioles and venules, all biomarkers were significant and lower in glaucoma patients compared to healthy controls except for tortuosity, venular singularity length and venular branching angles. Conclusion: We have automated the computation of 11 VBMs from retinal blood vessel segmentation. The PVBM toolbox is made open source under a GNU GPL 3 license and is available on physiozoo.com (following publication).

Anomaly detection (AD) aims at detecting abnormal samples that deviate from the expected normal patterns. Generally, it can be trained merely on normal data, without a requirement for abnormal samples, and thereby plays an important role in rare disease recognition and health screening in the medical domain. Despite the emergence of numerous methods for medical AD, the lack of a fair and comprehensive evaluation causes ambiguous conclusions and hinders the development of this field. To address this problem, this paper builds a benchmark with unified comparison. Seven medical datasets with five image modalities, including chest X-rays, brain MRIs, retinal fundus images, dermatoscopic images, and histopathology images, are curated for extensive evaluation. Thirty typical AD methods, including reconstruction and self-supervised learning-based methods, are involved in comparison of image-level anomaly classification and pixel-level anomaly segmentation. Furthermore, for the first time, we systematically investigate the effect of key components in existing methods, revealing unresolved challenges and potential future directions. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/caiyu6666/MedIAnomaly.

Ultrasound imaging has become the preferred imaging modality for early cancer screening due to its advantages of non-ionizing radiation, low cost, and real-time imaging capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnosis heavily relies on physician expertise, presenting challenges of high subjectivity and low diagnostic efficiency. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising solutions for this issue, but existing general-purpose models demonstrate limited knowledge in ultrasound medical tasks, with poor generalization in multi-organ lesion recognition and low efficiency across multi-task diagnostics. To address these limitations, we propose EchoVLM, a vision-language model specifically designed for ultrasound medical imaging. The model employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture trained on data spanning seven anatomical regions. This design enables the model to perform multiple tasks, including ultrasound report generation, diagnosis and visual question-answering (VQA). The experimental results demonstrated that EchoVLM achieved significant improvements of 10.15 and 4.77 points in BLEU-1 scores and ROUGE-1 scores respectively compared to Qwen2-VL on the ultrasound report generation task. These findings suggest that EchoVLM has substantial potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy in ultrasound imaging, thereby providing a viable technical solution for future clinical applications. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Asunatan/EchoVLM.

Confocal fluorescence microscopy is one of the most accessible and widely used imaging techniques for the study of biological processes. Scanning confocal microscopy allows the capture of high-quality images from 3D samples, yet suffers from well-known limitations such as photobleaching and phototoxicity of specimens caused by intense light exposure, which limits its use in some applications, especially for living cells. Cellular damage can be alleviated by changing imaging parameters to reduce light exposure, often at the expense of image quality. Machine/deep learning methods for single-image super-resolution (SISR) can be applied to restore image quality by upscaling lower-resolution (LR) images to produce high-resolution images (HR). These SISR methods have been successfully applied to photo-realistic images due partly to the abundance of publicly available data. In contrast, the lack of publicly available data partly limits their application and success in scanning confocal microscopy. In this paper, we introduce a large scanning confocal microscopy dataset named SR-CACO-2 that is comprised of low- and high-resolution image pairs marked for three different fluorescent markers. It allows the evaluation of performance of SISR methods on three different upscaling levels (X2, X4, X8). SR-CACO-2 contains the human epithelial cell line Caco-2 (ATCC HTB-37), and it is composed of 22 tiles that have been translated in the form of 9,937 image patches for experiments with SISR methods. Given the new SR-CACO-2 dataset, we also provide benchmarking results for 15 state-of-the-art methods that are representative of the main SISR families. Results show that these methods have limited success in producing high-resolution textures, indicating that SR-CACO-2 represents a challenging problem. Our dataset, code and pretrained weights are available: https://github.com/sbelharbi/sr-caco-2.

Driven by the demand for spatial intelligence and holistic scene perception, omnidirectional images (ODIs), which provide a complete 360 field of view, are receiving growing attention across diverse applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and embodied robotics. Despite their unique characteristics, ODIs exhibit remarkable differences from perspective images in geometric projection, spatial distribution, and boundary continuity, making it challenging for direct domain adaption from perspective methods. This survey reviews recent panoramic vision techniques with a particular emphasis on the perspective-to-panorama adaptation. We first revisit the panoramic imaging pipeline and projection methods to build the prior knowledge required for analyzing the structural disparities. Then, we summarize three challenges of domain adaptation: severe geometric distortions near the poles, non-uniform sampling in Equirectangular Projection (ERP), and periodic boundary continuity. Building on this, we cover 20+ representative tasks drawn from more than 300 research papers in two dimensions. On one hand, we present a cross-method analysis of representative strategies for addressing panoramic specific challenges across different tasks. On the other hand, we conduct a cross-task comparison and classify panoramic vision into four major categories: visual quality enhancement and assessment, visual understanding, multimodal understanding, and visual generation. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in data, models, and applications that will drive the advancement of panoramic vision research. We hope that our work can provide new insight and forward looking perspectives to advance the development of panoramic vision technologies. Our project page is https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Survey-of-Panorama

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize diagnosis and segmentation in medical imaging. However, development and clinical implementation face multiple challenges including limited data availability, lack of generalizability, and the necessity to incorporate multi-modal data effectively. A foundation model, which is a large-scale pre-trained AI model, offers a versatile base that can be adapted to a variety of specific tasks and contexts. Here, we present a novel foundation model, VISION-MAE, specifically designed for medical imaging. Specifically, VISION-MAE is trained on a dataset of 2.5 million unlabeled images from various modalities (CT, MR, PET, X-rays, and ultrasound), using self-supervised learning techniques. It is then adapted to classification and segmentation tasks using explicit labels. VISION-MAE has high label efficiency, outperforming several benchmark models in both in-domain and out-of-domain applications, and achieves high performance even with reduced availability of labeled data. This model represents a significant advancement in medical imaging AI, offering a generalizable and robust solution for improving segmentation and classification tasks while reducing the data annotation workload.

Surgical practice involves complex visual interpretation, procedural skills, and advanced medical knowledge, making surgical vision-language pretraining (VLP) particularly challenging due to this complexity and the limited availability of annotated data. To address the gap, we propose OphCLIP, a hierarchical retrieval-augmented vision-language pretraining framework specifically designed for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphCLIP leverages the OphVL dataset we constructed, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of over 375K hierarchically structured video-text pairs with tens of thousands of different combinations of attributes (surgeries, phases/operations/actions, instruments, medications, as well as more advanced aspects like the causes of eye diseases, surgical objectives, and postoperative recovery recommendations, etc). These hierarchical video-text correspondences enable OphCLIP to learn both fine-grained and long-term visual representations by aligning short video clips with detailed narrative descriptions and full videos with structured titles, capturing intricate surgical details and high-level procedural insights, respectively. Our OphCLIP also designs a retrieval-augmented pretraining framework to leverage the underexplored large-scale silent surgical procedure videos, automatically retrieving semantically relevant content to enhance the representation learning of narrative videos. Evaluation across 11 datasets for phase recognition and multi-instrument identification shows OphCLIP's robust generalization and superior performance.

In the field of medical imaging, the scarcity of large-scale datasets due to privacy restrictions stands as a significant barrier to develop large models for medical. To address this issue, we introduce SynFundus-1M, a high-quality synthetic dataset with over 1 million retinal fundus images and extensive disease and pathologies annotations, which is generated by a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model. The SynFundus-Generator and SynFundus-1M achieve superior Frechet Inception Distance (FID) scores compared to existing methods on main-stream public real datasets. Furthermore, the ophthalmologists evaluation validate the difficulty in discerning these synthetic images from real ones, confirming the SynFundus-1M's authenticity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that both CNN and ViT can benifit from SynFundus-1M by pretraining or training directly. Compared to datasets like ImageNet or EyePACS, models train on SynFundus-1M not only achieve better performance but also faster convergence on various downstream tasks.

Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (FLI) is a critical molecular imaging modality that provides unique information about the tissue microenvironment, which is invaluable for biomedical applications. FLI operates by acquiring and analyzing photon time-of-arrival histograms to extract quantitative parameters associated with temporal fluorescence decay. These histograms are influenced by the intrinsic properties of the fluorophore, instrument parameters, time-of-flight distributions associated with pixel-wise variations in the topographic and optical characteristics of the sample. Recent advancements in Deep Learning (DL) have enabled improved fluorescence lifetime parameter estimation. However, existing models are primarily designed for planar surface samples, limiting their applicability in translational scenarios involving complex surface profiles, such as in-vivo whole-animal or imaged guided surgical applications. To address this limitation, we present MFliNet (Macroscopic FLI Network), a novel DL architecture that integrates the Instrument Response Function (IRF) as an additional input alongside experimental photon time-of-arrival histograms. Leveraging the capabilities of a Differential Transformer encoder-decoder architecture, MFliNet effectively focuses on critical input features, such as variations in photon time-of-arrival distributions. We evaluate MFliNet using rigorously designed tissue-mimicking phantoms and preclinical in-vivo cancer xenograft models. Our results demonstrate the model's robustness and suitability for complex macroscopic FLI applications, offering new opportunities for advanced biomedical imaging in diverse and challenging settings.

We introduce VascX models, a comprehensive set of model ensembles for analyzing retinal vasculature from color fundus images (CFIs). Annotated CFIs were aggregated from public datasets for vessel, artery-vein, and disc segmentation; and fovea localization. Additional CFIs from the population-based Rotterdam Study were, with arteries and veins annotated by graders at pixel level. Our models achieved robust performance across devices from different vendors, varying levels of image quality levels, and diverse pathologies. Our models demonstrated superior segmentation performance compared to existing systems under a variety of conditions. Significant enhancements were observed in artery-vein and disc segmentation performance, particularly in segmentations of these structures on CFIs of intermediate quality, a common characteristic of large cohorts and clinical datasets. Our model outperformed human graders in segmenting vessels with greater precision. With VascX models we provide a robust, ready-to-use set of model ensembles and inference code aimed at simplifying the implementation and enhancing the quality of automated retinal vasculature analyses. The precise vessel parameters generated by the model can serve as starting points for the identification of disease patterns in and outside of the eye.

The development of larger models for medical image analysis has led to increased performance. However, it also affected our ability to explain and validate model decisions. Models can use non-relevant parts of images, also called spurious correlations or shortcuts, to obtain high performance on benchmark datasets but fail in real-world scenarios. In this work, we challenge the capacity of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify chest X-rays and eye fundus images while masking out clinically relevant parts of the image. We show that all models trained on the PadChest dataset, irrespective of the masking strategy, are able to obtain an Area Under the Curve (AUC) above random. Moreover, the models trained on full images obtain good performance on images without the region of interest (ROI), even superior to the one obtained on images only containing the ROI. We also reveal a possible spurious correlation in the Chaksu dataset while the performances are more aligned with the expectation of an unbiased model. We go beyond the performance analysis with the usage of the explainability method SHAP and the analysis of embeddings. We asked a radiology resident to interpret chest X-rays under different masking to complement our findings with clinical knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/TheoSourget/MMC_Masking and https://github.com/TheoSourget/MMC_Masking_EyeFundus

Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) aims to completely remove malignant lesions while maximizing healthy tissue preservation. Intraoperative margin assessment is essential to achieve a balance between thorough cancer resection and tissue conservation. A deep ultraviolet fluorescence scanning microscope (DUV-FSM) enables rapid acquisition of whole surface images (WSIs) for excised tissue, providing contrast between malignant and normal tissues. However, breast cancer classification with DUV WSIs is challenged by high resolutions and complex histopathological features. This study introduces a DUV WSI classification framework using a patch-level vision transformer (ViT) model, capturing local and global features. Grad-CAM++ saliency weighting highlights relevant spatial regions, enhances result interpretability, and improves diagnostic accuracy for benign and malignant tissue classification. A comprehensive 5-fold cross-validation demonstrates the proposed approach significantly outperforms conventional deep learning methods, achieving a classification accuracy of 98.33%.

Diagnosing and treating skin diseases require advanced visual skills across domains and the ability to synthesize information from multiple imaging modalities. While current deep learning models excel at specific tasks like skin cancer diagnosis from dermoscopic images, they struggle to meet the complex, multimodal requirements of clinical practice. Here, we introduce PanDerm, a multimodal dermatology foundation model pretrained through self-supervised learning on over 2 million real-world skin disease images from 11 clinical institutions across 4 imaging modalities. We evaluated PanDerm on 28 diverse benchmarks, including skin cancer screening, risk stratification, differential diagnosis of common and rare skin conditions, lesion segmentation, longitudinal monitoring, and metastasis prediction and prognosis. PanDerm achieved state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated tasks, often outperforming existing models when using only 10% of labeled data. We conducted three reader studies to assess PanDerm's potential clinical utility. PanDerm outperformed clinicians by 10.2% in early-stage melanoma detection through longitudinal analysis, improved clinicians' skin cancer diagnostic accuracy by 11% on dermoscopy images, and enhanced non-dermatologist healthcare providers' differential diagnosis by 16.5% across 128 skin conditions on clinical photographs. These results demonstrate PanDerm's potential to improve patient care across diverse clinical scenarios and serve as a model for developing multimodal foundation models in other medical specialties, potentially accelerating the integration of AI support in healthcare. The code can be found at https://github.com/SiyuanYan1/PanDerm.

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

MIDOG 2025 Track 1 requires mitosis detection in whole-slideimages (WSIs) containing non-tumor, inflamed, and necrotic re-gions. Due to the complicated and heterogeneous context, aswell as possible artifacts, there are often false positives and falsenegatives, thus degrading the detection F1-score. To addressthis problem, we propose a two-stage framework. Firstly, an im-proved YOLO11x, integrated with EMA attention and LSConv,is employed to generate mitosis candidates. We use a low confi-dence threshold to generate as many proposals as possible, en-suring the detection recall. Then, a ConvNeXt-Tiny classifieris employed to filter out the false positives, ensuring the detec-tion precision. Consequently, the proposed two-stage frame-work can generate a high detection F1-score. Evaluated on afused dataset comprising MIDOG++, MITOS_WSI_CCMCT,and MITOS_WSI_CMC, our framework achieves an F1-scoreof 0.882, which is 0.035 higher than the single-stage YOLO11xbaseline. This performance gain is produced by a significantprecision improvement, from 0.762 to 0.839, and a comparablerecall. On the MIDOG 2025 Track 1 preliminary test set, thealgorithm scores an F1 score of 0.7587. The code is available athttps://github.com/xxiao0304/MIDOG-2025-Track-1-of-SZTU.

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and early detection through low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has shown significant promise in reducing death rates. With the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medical imaging, the development and evaluation of robust AI models require access to large, well-annotated datasets. In this study, we introduce the utility of Duke Lung Cancer Screening (DLCS) Dataset, the largest open-access LDCT dataset with over 2,000 scans and 3,000 expert-verified nodules. We benchmark deep learning models for both 3D nodule detection and lung cancer classification across internal and external datasets including LUNA16, LUNA25, and NLST-3D+. For detection, we develop two MONAI-based RetinaNet models (DLCSDmD and LUNA16-mD), evaluated using the Competition Performance Metric (CPM). For classification, we compare five models, including state-of-the-art pretrained models (Models Genesis, Med3D), a selfsupervised foundation model (FMCB), a randomly initialized ResNet50, and proposed a novel Strategic Warm-Start++ (SWS++) model. SWS++ uses curated candidate patches to pretrain a classification backbone within the same detection pipeline, enabling task-relevant feature learning. Our models demonstrated strong generalizability, with SWS++ achieving comparable or superior performance to existing foundational models across multiple datasets (AUC: 0.71 to 0.90). All code, models, and data are publicly released to promote reproducibility and collaboration. This work establishes a standardized benchmarking resource for lung cancer AI research, supporting future efforts in model development, validation, and clinical translation.

Identification of vessel structures of different sizes in biomedical images is crucial in the diagnosis of many neurodegenerative diseases. However, the sparsity of good-quality annotations of such images makes the task of vessel segmentation challenging. Deep learning offers an efficient way to segment vessels of different sizes by learning their high-level feature representations and the spatial continuity of such features across dimensions. Semi-supervised patch-based approaches have been effective in identifying small vessels of one to two voxels in diameter. This study focuses on improving the segmentation quality by considering the spatial correlation of the features using the Maximum Intensity Projection~(MIP) as an additional loss criterion. Two methods are proposed with the incorporation of MIPs of label segmentation on the single~(z-axis) and multiple perceivable axes of the 3D volume. The proposed MIP-based methods produce segmentations with improved vessel continuity, which is evident in visual examinations of ROIs. Patch-based training is improved by introducing an additional loss term, MIP loss, to penalise the predicted discontinuity of vessels. A training set of 14 volumes is selected from the StudyForrest dataset comprising of 18 7-Tesla 3D Time-of-Flight~(ToF) Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) images. The generalisation performance of the method is evaluated using the other unseen volumes in the dataset. It is observed that the proposed method with multi-axes MIP loss produces better quality segmentations with a median Dice of 80.245 pm 0.129. Also, the method with single-axis MIP loss produces segmentations with a median Dice of 79.749 pm 0.109. Furthermore, a visual comparison of the ROIs in the predicted segmentation reveals a significant improvement in the continuity of the vessels when MIP loss is incorporated into training.

Lensless cameras disregard the conventional design that imaging should mimic the human eye. This is done by replacing the lens with a thin mask, and moving image formation to the digital post-processing. State-of-the-art lensless imaging techniques use learned approaches that combine physical modeling and neural networks. However, these approaches make simplifying modeling assumptions for ease of calibration and computation. Moreover, the generalizability of learned approaches to lensless measurements of new masks has not been studied. To this end, we utilize a modular learned reconstruction in which a key component is a pre-processor prior to image recovery. We theoretically demonstrate the pre-processor's necessity for standard image recovery techniques (Wiener filtering and iterative algorithms), and through extensive experiments show its effectiveness for multiple lensless imaging approaches and across datasets of different mask types (amplitude and phase). We also perform the first generalization benchmark across mask types to evaluate how well reconstructions trained with one system generalize to others. Our modular reconstruction enables us to use pre-trained components and transfer learning on new systems to cut down weeks of tedious measurements and training. As part of our work, we open-source four datasets, and software for measuring datasets and for training our modular reconstruction.

In biomedical imaging analysis, the dichotomy between 2D and 3D data presents a significant challenge. While 3D volumes offer superior real-world applicability, they are less available for each modality and not easy to train in large scale, whereas 2D samples are abundant but less comprehensive. This paper introduces the Cross-D Conv operation, a novel approach that bridges the dimensional gap by learning the phase shifting in the Fourier domain. Our method enables seamless weight transfer between 2D and 3D convolution operations, effectively facilitating cross-dimensional learning. The proposed architecture leverages the abundance of 2D training data to enhance 3D model performance, offering a practical solution to the multimodal data scarcity challenge in 3D medical model pretraining. Experimental validation on the RadImagenet (2D) and multimodal (3D) sets demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable or superior performance in feature quality assessment comparable to conventional methods. The enhanced convolution operation presents new opportunities for developing efficient classification and segmentation models in medical imaging. This work represents an advancement in cross-dimensional and multi-modal medical image analysis, offering a robust framework for utilizing 2D priors in 3D model pretraining or vice versa while maintaining computational efficiency.

Clinical decision-making relies heavily on understanding relative positions of anatomical structures and anomalies. Therefore, for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to be applicable in clinical practice, the ability to accurately determine relative positions on medical images is a fundamental prerequisite. Despite its importance, this capability remains highly underexplored. To address this gap, we evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art VLMs, GPT-4o, Llama3.2, Pixtral, and JanusPro, and find that all models fail at this fundamental task. Inspired by successful approaches in computer vision, we investigate whether visual prompts, such as alphanumeric or colored markers placed on anatomical structures, can enhance performance. While these markers provide moderate improvements, results remain significantly lower on medical images compared to observations made on natural images. Our evaluations suggest that, in medical imaging, VLMs rely more on prior anatomical knowledge than on actual image content for answering relative position questions, often leading to incorrect conclusions. To facilitate further research in this area, we introduce the MIRP , Medical Imaging Relative Positioning, benchmark dataset, designed to systematically evaluate the capability to identify relative positions in medical images.

This study presents a deep learning system for breast cancer detection in mammography, developed using a modified EfficientNetV2 architecture with enhanced attention mechanisms. The model was trained on mammograms from a major Thai medical center and validated on three distinct datasets: an in-domain test set (9,421 cases), a biopsy-confirmed set (883 cases), and an out-of-domain generalizability set (761 cases) collected from two different hospitals. For cancer detection, the model achieved AUROCs of 0.89, 0.96, and 0.94 on the respective datasets. The system's lesion localization capability, evaluated using metrics including Lesion Localization Fraction (LLF) and Non-Lesion Localization Fraction (NLF), demonstrated robust performance in identifying suspicious regions. Clinical validation through concordance tests showed strong agreement with radiologists: 83.5% classification and 84.0% localization concordance for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 78.1% classification and 79.6% localization concordance for out-of-domain cases. Expert radiologists' acceptance rate also averaged 96.7% for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 89.3% for out-of-domain cases. The system achieved a System Usability Scale score of 74.17 for source hospital, and 69.20 for validation hospitals, indicating good clinical acceptance. These results demonstrate the model's effectiveness in assisting mammogram interpretation, with the potential to enhance breast cancer screening workflows in clinical practice.

Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose the first comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,184 precisely aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve mAP by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.

Non-ideal measurement computed tomography (NICT), which sacrifices optimal imaging standards for new advantages in CT imaging, is expanding the clinical application scope of CT images. However, with the reduction of imaging standards, the image quality has also been reduced, extremely limiting the clinical acceptability. Although numerous studies have demonstrated the feasibility of deep learning for the NICT enhancement in specific scenarios, their high data cost and limited generalizability have become large obstacles. The recent research on the foundation model has brought new opportunities for building a universal NICT enhancement model - bridging the image quality degradation with minimal data cost. However, owing to the challenges in the collection of large pre-training datasets and the compatibility of data variation, no success has been reported. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale integrated Transformer AMPlifier (TAMP), the first imaging foundation model for universal NICT enhancement. It has been pre-trained on a large-scale physical-driven simulation dataset with 3.6 million NICT-ICT image pairs, and is able to directly generalize to the NICT enhancement tasks with various non-ideal settings and body regions. Via the adaptation with few data, it can further achieve professional performance in real-world specific scenarios. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed TAMP has significant potential for promoting the exploration and application of NICT and serving a wider range of medical scenarios.

Cerebrovascular disease often requires multiple imaging modalities for accurate diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) and Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiography (TOF-MRA) are two common non-invasive angiography techniques, each with distinct strengths in accessibility, safety, and diagnostic accuracy. While CTA is more widely used in acute stroke due to its faster acquisition times and higher diagnostic accuracy, TOF-MRA is preferred for its safety, as it avoids radiation exposure and contrast agent-related health risks. Despite the predominant role of CTA in clinical workflows, there is a scarcity of open-source CTA data, limiting the research and development of AI models for tasks such as large vessel occlusion detection and aneurysm segmentation. This study explores diffusion-based image-to-image translation models to generate synthetic CTA images from TOF-MRA input. We demonstrate the modality conversion from TOF-MRA to CTA and show that diffusion models outperform a traditional U-Net-based approach. Our work compares different state-of-the-art diffusion architectures and samplers, offering recommendations for optimal model performance in this cross-modality translation task.

Vision foundation models like DINOv2 demonstrate remarkable potential in medical imaging despite their origin in natural image domains. However, their design inherently works best for uni-modal image analysis, limiting their effectiveness for multi-modal imaging tasks that are common in many medical fields, such as neurology and oncology. While supervised models perform well in this setting, they fail to leverage unlabeled datasets and struggle with missing modalities, a frequent challenge in clinical settings. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MM-DINOv2, a novel and efficient framework that adapts the pre-trained vision foundation model DINOv2 for multi-modal medical imaging. Our approach incorporates multi-modal patch embeddings, enabling vision foundation models to effectively process multi-modal imaging data. To address missing modalities, we employ full-modality masking, which encourages the model to learn robust cross-modality relationships. Furthermore, we leverage semi-supervised learning to harness large unlabeled datasets, enhancing both the accuracy and reliability of medical predictions. Applied to glioma subtype classification from multi-sequence brain MRI, our method achieves a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.6 on an external test set, surpassing state-of-the-art supervised approaches by +11.1%. Our work establishes a scalable and robust solution for multi-modal medical imaging tasks, leveraging powerful vision foundation models pre-trained on natural images while addressing real-world clinical challenges such as missing data and limited annotations.

We propose a novel framework for retinal feature point alignment, designed for learning cross-modality features to enhance matching and registration across multi-modality retinal images. Our model draws on the success of previous learning-based feature detection and description methods. To better leverage unlabeled data and constrain the model to reproduce relevant keypoints, we integrate a keypoint-based segmentation task. It is trained in a self-supervised manner by enforcing segmentation consistency between different augmentations of the same image. By incorporating a keypoint augmented self-supervised layer, we achieve robust feature extraction across modalities. Extensive evaluation on two public datasets and one in-house dataset demonstrates significant improvements in performance for modality-agnostic retinal feature alignment. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/RetinaIPA.

Following the impressive development of LLMs, vision-language alignment in LLMs is actively being researched to enable multimodal reasoning and visual IO. This direction of research is particularly relevant to medical imaging because medical image analysis and generation consist of reasoning based on a combination of visual features and prior knowledge. Many recent works have focused on training adapter networks that serve as an information bridge between image processing networks and LLMs; but presumably, in order to achieve maximum reasoning potential of LLMs on visual information as well, visual and language features should be allowed to interact more freely. This is especially important in the medical domain because understanding and generating medical images such as chest X-rays (CXR) require not only accurate visual and language-based reasoning but also a more intimate mapping between the two modalities. Thus, taking inspiration from previous work on the transformer and VQ-GAN combination for bidirectional image and text generation, we build upon this approach and develop a method for instruction-tuning an LLM pre-trained only on text to gain vision-language capabilities for medical images. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained LLM's existing question-answering and instruction-following abilities to teach it to understand visual inputs by instructing it to answer questions about image inputs and, symmetrically, output both text and image responses appropriate to a given query by tuning the LLM with diverse tasks that encompass image-based text-generation and text-based image-generation. We show that our model, LLM-CXR, trained in this approach shows better image-text alignment in both CXR understanding and generation tasks while being smaller in size compared to previously developed models that perform a narrower range of tasks. The code is at https://github.com/hyn2028/llm-cxr.

Foundation models, often pre-trained with large-scale data, have achieved paramount success in jump-starting various vision and language applications. Recent advances further enable adapting foundation models in downstream tasks efficiently using only a few training samples, e.g., in-context learning. Yet, the application of such learning paradigms in medical image analysis remains scarce due to the shortage of publicly accessible data and benchmarks. In this paper, we aim at approaches adapting the foundation models for medical image classification and present a novel dataset and benchmark for the evaluation, i.e., examining the overall performance of accommodating the large-scale foundation models downstream on a set of diverse real-world clinical tasks. We collect five sets of medical imaging data from multiple institutes targeting a variety of real-world clinical tasks (22,349 images in total), i.e., thoracic diseases screening in X-rays, pathological lesion tissue screening, lesion detection in endoscopy images, neonatal jaundice evaluation, and diabetic retinopathy grading. Results of multiple baseline methods are demonstrated using the proposed dataset from both accuracy and cost-effective perspectives.

Anomaly detection (AD) is essential for industrial inspection, yet existing methods typically rely on ``comparing'' test images to normal references from a training set. However, variations in appearance and positioning often complicate the alignment of these references with the test image, limiting detection accuracy. We observe that most anomalies manifest as local variations, meaning that even within anomalous images, valuable normal information remains. We argue that this information is useful and may be more aligned with the anomalies since both the anomalies and the normal information originate from the same image. Therefore, rather than relying on external normality from the training set, we propose INP-Former, a novel method that extracts Intrinsic Normal Prototypes (INPs) directly from the test image. Specifically, we introduce the INP Extractor, which linearly combines normal tokens to represent INPs. We further propose an INP Coherence Loss to ensure INPs can faithfully represent normality for the testing image. These INPs then guide the INP-Guided Decoder to reconstruct only normal tokens, with reconstruction errors serving as anomaly scores. Additionally, we propose a Soft Mining Loss to prioritize hard-to-optimize samples during training. INP-Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-class, multi-class, and few-shot AD tasks across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD, positioning it as a versatile and universal solution for AD. Remarkably, INP-Former also demonstrates some zero-shot AD capability. Code is available at:https://github.com/luow23/INP-Former.

Medical eye-tracking data is an important information source for understanding how radiologists visually interpret medical images. This information not only improves the accuracy of deep learning models for X-ray analysis but also their interpretability, enhancing transparency in decision-making. However, the current eye-tracking data is dispersed, unprocessed, and ambiguous, making it difficult to derive meaningful insights. Therefore, there is a need to create a new dataset with more focus and purposeful eyetracking data, improving its utility for diagnostic applications. In this work, we propose a refinement method inspired by the target-present visual search challenge: there is a specific finding and fixations are guided to locate it. After refining the existing eye-tracking datasets, we transform them into a curated visual search dataset, called GazeSearch, specifically for radiology findings, where each fixation sequence is purposefully aligned to the task of locating a particular finding. Subsequently, we introduce a scan path prediction baseline, called ChestSearch, specifically tailored to GazeSearch. Finally, we employ the newly introduced GazeSearch as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of current state-of-the-art methods, offering a comprehensive assessment for visual search in the medical imaging domain. Code is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/GazeSearch.

The field of computer vision applied to videos of minimally invasive surgery is ever-growing. Workflow recognition pertains to the automated recognition of various aspects of a surgery: including which surgical steps are performed; and which surgical instruments are used. This information can later be used to assist clinicians when learning the surgery; during live surgery; and when writing operation notes. The Pituitary Vision (PitVis) 2023 Challenge tasks the community to step and instrument recognition in videos of endoscopic pituitary surgery. This is a unique task when compared to other minimally invasive surgeries due to the smaller working space, which limits and distorts vision; and higher frequency of instrument and step switching, which requires more precise model predictions. Participants were provided with 25-videos, with results presented at the MICCAI-2023 conference as part of the Endoscopic Vision 2023 Challenge in Vancouver, Canada, on 08-Oct-2023. There were 18-submissions from 9-teams across 6-countries, using a variety of deep learning models. A commonality between the top performing models was incorporating spatio-temporal and multi-task methods, with greater than 50% and 10% macro-F1-score improvement over purely spacial single-task models in step and instrument recognition respectively. The PitVis-2023 Challenge therefore demonstrates state-of-the-art computer vision models in minimally invasive surgery are transferable to a new dataset, with surgery specific techniques used to enhance performance, progressing the field further. Benchmark results are provided in the paper, and the dataset is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.5522/04/26531686.

Since COVID strongly affects the respiratory system, lung CT-scans can be used for the analysis of a patients health. We introduce a neural network for the prediction of the severity of lung damage and the detection of a COVID-infection using three-dimensional CT-data. Therefore, we adapt the recent ConvNeXt model to process three-dimensional data. Furthermore, we design and analyze different pretraining methods specifically designed to improve the models ability to handle three-dimensional CT-data. We rank 2nd in the 1st COVID19 Severity Detection Challenge and 3rd in the 2nd COVID19 Detection Challenge.

As a lightweight and non-invasive imaging technique, lung ultrasound (LUS) has gained importance for assessing lung pathologies. The use of Artificial intelligence (AI) in medical decision support systems is promising due to the time- and expertise-intensive interpretation, however, due to the poor quality of existing data used for training AI models, their usability for real-world applications remains unclear. In a prospective study, we analyze data from 63 COVID-19 suspects (33 positive) collected at Maastricht University Medical Centre. Ultrasound recordings at six body locations were acquired following the BLUE protocol and manually labeled for severity of lung involvement. Several AI models were applied and trained for detection and severity of pulmonary infection. The severity of the lung infection, as assigned by human annotators based on the LUS videos, is not significantly different between COVID-19 positive and negative patients (p = 0.89). Nevertheless, the predictions of image-based AI models identify a COVID-19 infection with 65% accuracy when applied zero-shot (i.e., trained on other datasets), and up to 79% with targeted training, whereas the accuracy based on human annotations is at most 65%. Multi-modal models combining images and CBC improve significantly over image-only models. Although our analysis generally supports the value of AI in LUS assessment, the evaluated models fall short of the performance expected from previous work. We find this is due to 1) the heterogeneity of LUS datasets, limiting the generalization ability to new data, 2) the frame-based processing of AI models ignoring video-level information, and 3) lack of work on multi-modal models that can extract the most relevant information from video-, image- and variable-based inputs. To aid future research, we publish the dataset at: https://github.com/NinaWie/COVID-BLUES.

OpenAI's GPT-4o model, integrating multi-modal inputs and outputs within an autoregressive architecture, has demonstrated unprecedented performance in image generation. In this work, we investigate its potential impact on the image restoration community. We present the first systematic evaluation of GPT-4o across diverse restoration tasks. Our experiments reveal that, although restoration outputs from GPT-4o are visually appealing, they often suffer from pixel-level structural fidelity when compared to ground-truth images. Common issues are variations in image proportions, shifts in object positions and quantities, and changes in viewpoint.To address it, taking image dehazing, derainning, and low-light enhancement as representative case studies, we show that GPT-4o's outputs can serve as powerful visual priors, substantially enhancing the performance of existing dehazing networks. It offers practical guidelines and a baseline framework to facilitate the integration of GPT-4o into future image restoration pipelines. We hope the study on GPT-4o image restoration will accelerate innovation in the broader field of image generation areas. To support further research, we will release GPT-4o-restored images from over 10 widely used image restoration datasets.

Surgical scene perception via videos are critical for advancing robotic surgery, telesurgery, and AI-assisted surgery, particularly in ophthalmology. However, the scarcity of diverse and richly annotated video datasets has hindered the development of intelligent systems for surgical workflow analysis. Existing datasets for surgical workflow analysis, which typically face challenges such as small scale, a lack of diversity in surgery and phase categories, and the absence of time-localized annotations, limit the requirements for action understanding and model generalization validation in complex and diverse real-world surgical scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce OphNet, a large-scale, expert-annotated video benchmark for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphNet features: 1) A diverse collection of 2,278 surgical videos spanning 66 types of cataract, glaucoma, and corneal surgeries, with detailed annotations for 102 unique surgical phases and 150 granular operations; 2) It offers sequential and hierarchical annotations for each surgery, phase, and operation, enabling comprehensive understanding and improved interpretability; 3) Moreover, OphNet provides time-localized annotations, facilitating temporal localization and prediction tasks within surgical workflows. With approximately 205 hours of surgical videos, OphNet is about 20 times larger than the largest existing surgical workflow analysis benchmark. Our dataset and code have been made available at: https://github.com/minghu0830/OphNet-benchmark.

While models derived from Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been phonemically surging, pre-trained models cannot seamlessly adapt to arbitrary resolution images without altering the architecture and configuration, such as sampling the positional encoding, limiting their flexibility for various vision tasks. For instance, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on ViT-Huge requires all input images to be resized to 1024times1024. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Multi-Head Self-Attention Convolution (MSA-Conv) that incorporates Self-Attention within generalized convolutions, including standard, dilated, and depthwise ones. Enabling transformers to handle images of varying sizes without retraining or rescaling, the use of MSA-Conv further reduces computational costs compared to global attention in ViT, which grows costly as image size increases. Later, we present the Vision Transformer in Convolution (TiC) as a proof of concept for image classification with MSA-Conv, where two capacity enhancing strategies, namely Multi-Directional Cyclic Shifted Mechanism and Inter-Pooling Mechanism, have been proposed, through establishing long-distance connections between tokens and enlarging the effective receptive field. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate the overall effectiveness of TiC. Additionally, ablation studies confirm the performance improvement made by MSA-Conv and the two capacity enhancing strategies separately. Note that our proposal aims at studying an alternative to the global attention used in ViT, while MSA-Conv meets our goal by making TiC comparable to state-of-the-art on ImageNet-1K. Code will be released at https://github.com/zs670980918/MSA-Conv.

Computed tomography (CT) serves as an effective tool for lung cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, providing a rich source of features to quantify temporal and spatial tumor changes. Nonetheless, the diversity of CT scanners and customized acquisition protocols can introduce significant inconsistencies in texture features, even when assessing the same patient. This variability poses a fundamental challenge for subsequent research that relies on consistent image features. Existing CT image standardization models predominantly utilize GAN-based supervised or semi-supervised learning, but their performance remains limited. We present DiffusionCT, an innovative score-based DDPM model that operates in the latent space to transform disparate non-standard distributions into a standardized form. The architecture comprises a U-Net-based encoder-decoder, augmented by a DDPM model integrated at the bottleneck position. First, the encoder-decoder is trained independently, without embedding DDPM, to capture the latent representation of the input data. Second, the latent DDPM model is trained while keeping the encoder-decoder parameters fixed. Finally, the decoder uses the transformed latent representation to generate a standardized CT image, providing a more consistent basis for downstream analysis. Empirical tests on patient CT images indicate notable improvements in image standardization using DiffusionCT. Additionally, the model significantly reduces image noise in SPAD images, further validating the effectiveness of DiffusionCT for advanced imaging tasks.

Current methods for performing 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS) in ultrasound imaging data often face severe artifacts when training NeRF-based approaches. The artifacts produced by current approaches differ from NeRF floaters in general scenes because of the unique nature of ultrasound capture. Furthermore, existing models fail to produce reasonable 3D reconstructions when ultrasound data is captured or obtained casually in uncontrolled environments, which is common in clinical settings. Consequently, existing reconstruction and NVS methods struggle to handle ultrasound motion, fail to capture intricate details, and cannot model transparent and reflective surfaces. In this work, we introduced NeRF-US, which incorporates 3D-geometry guidance for border probability and scattering density into NeRF training, while also utilizing ultrasound-specific rendering over traditional volume rendering. These 3D priors are learned through a diffusion model. Through experiments conducted on our new "Ultrasound in the Wild" dataset, we observed accurate, clinically plausible, artifact-free reconstructions.

Mammography, an X-ray-based imaging technique, remains central to the early detection of breast cancer. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled increasingly sophisticated computer-aided diagnostic methods, evolving from patch-based classifiers to whole-image approaches and then to multi-view architectures that jointly analyze complementary projections. Despite this progress, several critical questions remain unanswered. In this study, we systematically investigate these issues by addressing five key research questions: (1) the role of patch classifiers in performance, (2) the transferability of natural-image-trained backbones, (3) the advantages of learn-to-resize over conventional downscaling, (4) the contribution of multi-view integration, and (5) the robustness of findings across varying image quality. Beyond benchmarking, our experiments demonstrate clear performance gains over prior work. For the CBIS-DDSM dataset, we improved single-view AUC from 0.8153 to 0.8343, and multiple-view AUC from 0.8483 to 0.8658. Using a new comparative method, we also observed a 0.0217 AUC increase when extending from single to multiple-view analysis. On the complete VinDr-Mammo dataset, the multiple-view approach further improved results, achieving a 0.0492 AUC increase over single view and reaching 0.8511 AUC overall. These results establish new state-of-the-art benchmarks, providing clear evidence of the advantages of multi-view architectures for mammogram interpretation. Beyond performance, our analysis offers principled insights into model design and transfer learning strategies, contributing to the development of more accurate and reliable breast cancer screening tools. The inference code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/dpetrini/multiple-view.

Comparative settings (e.g. pairwise choice, listwise ranking) have been adopted by a wide range of subjective studies for image quality assessment (IQA), as it inherently standardizes the evaluation criteria across different observers and offer more clear-cut responses. In this work, we extend the edge of emerging large multi-modality models (LMMs) to further advance visual quality comparison into open-ended settings, that 1) can respond to open-range questions on quality comparison; 2) can provide detailed reasonings beyond direct answers. To this end, we propose the Co-Instruct. To train this first-of-its-kind open-source open-ended visual quality comparer, we collect the Co-Instruct-562K dataset, from two sources: (a) LMM-merged single image quality description, (b) GPT-4V "teacher" responses on unlabeled data. Furthermore, to better evaluate this setting, we propose the MICBench, the first benchmark on multi-image comparison for LMMs. We demonstrate that Co-Instruct not only achieves 30% higher superior accuracy than state-of-the-art open-source LMMs, but also outperforms GPT-4V (its teacher), on both existing related benchmarks and the proposed MICBench. Our model is published at https://huggingface.co/q-future/co-instruct.

Echocardiography plays a central role in cardiac imaging, offering dynamic views of the heart that are essential for diagnosis and monitoring. However, image quality can be significantly degraded by haze arising from multipath reverberations, particularly in difficult-to-image patients. In this work, we propose a semantic-guided, diffusion-based dehazing algorithm developed for the MICCAI Dehazing Echocardiography Challenge (DehazingEcho2025). Our method integrates a pixel-wise noise model, derived from semantic segmentation of hazy inputs into a diffusion posterior sampling framework guided by a generative prior trained on clean ultrasound data. Quantitative evaluation on the challenge dataset demonstrates strong performance across contrast and fidelity metrics. Code for the submitted algorithm is available at https://github.com/tristan-deep/semantic-diffusion-echo-dehazing.

PURPOSE: Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) entails high morbidity and mortality rates. Convolutional neural networks (CNN), a form of deep learning, are capable of generating highly accurate predictions from imaging data. Our objective was to predict mortality in SAH patients by processing the initial CT scan on a CNN based algorithm. METHODS: Retrospective multicentric study of a consecutive cohort of patients with SAH between 2011-2022. Demographic, clinical and radiological variables were analyzed. Pre-processed baseline CT scan images were used as the input for training a CNN using AUCMEDI Framework. Our model's architecture leverages the DenseNet-121 structure, employing transfer learning principles. The output variable was mortality in the first three months. Performance of the model was evaluated by statistical parameters conventionally used in studies involving artificial intelligence methods. RESULTS: Images from 219 patients were processed, 175 for training and validation of the CNN and 44 for its evaluation. 52%(115/219) of patients were female, and the median age was 58(SD=13.06) years. 18.5%(39/219) were idiopathic SAH. Mortality rate was 28.5%(63/219). The model showed good accuracy at predicting mortality in SAH patients exclusively using the images of the initial CT scan (Accuracy=74%, F1=75% and AUC=82%). CONCLUSION: Modern image processing techniques based on AI and CNN make possible to predict mortality in SAH patients with high accuracy using CT scan images as the only input. These models might be optimized by including more data and patients resulting in better training, development and performance on tasks which are beyond the skills of conventional clinical knowledge.