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ARXIV Cancer: general cancer Method: large vision-language model

OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysis

Tianwei Lin, Zhongwei Qiu, Wenqiao Zhang, Jiang Liu, Yihan Xie, Mingjian Gao, Zhenxuan Fan, Zhaocheng Li, Sijing Li, Zhongle Xie, Peng LU, Yueting Zhuang, Ling Zhang, Beng Chin Ooi, Yingda Xia
Published 2026-02-18 00:42
The paper presents OmniCT, a unified Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) designed for comprehensive analysis of Computed Tomography (CT) images. It addresses the limitations of existing slice-driven and volume-driven LVLMs by enhancing spatial consistency and organ-level semantics. The model demonstrates superior performance across various clinical tasks, establishing a new paradigm for cross-modal medical imaging understanding.
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Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the most widely used and diagnostically information-dense imaging modalities, covering critical organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and colon. Clinical interpretation relies on both slice-driven local features (e.g., sub-centimeter nodules, lesion boundaries) and volume-driven spatial representations (e.g., tumor infiltration, inter-organ anatomical relations). However, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain fragmented in CT slice versus volumetric understanding: slice-driven LVLMs show strong generalization but lack cross-slice spatial consistency, while volume-driven LVLMs explicitly capture volumetric semantics but suffer from coarse granularity and poor compatibility with slice inputs. The absence of a unified modeling paradigm constitutes a major bottleneck for the clinical translation of medical LVLMs. We present OmniCT, a powerful unified slice-volume LVLM for CT scenarios, which makes three contributions: (i) Spatial Consistency Enhancement (SCE): volumetric slice composition combined with tri-axial positional embedding that introduces volumetric consistency, and an MoE hybrid projection enables efficient slice-volume adaptation; (ii) Organ-level Semantic Enhancement (OSE): segmentation and ROI localization explicitly align anatomical regions, emphasizing lesion- and organ-level semantics; (iii) MedEval-CT: the largest slice-volume CT dataset and hybrid benchmark integrates comprehensive metrics for unified evaluation. OmniCT consistently outperforms existing methods with a substantial margin across diverse clinical tasks and satisfies both micro-level detail sensitivity and macro-level spatial reasoning. More importantly, it establishes a new paradigm for cross-modal medical imaging understanding. Our project is available at https://github.com/ZJU4HealthCare/OmniCT.

ARXIV Cancer: unknown Method: probabilistic vision-language model

MedProbCLIP: Probabilistic Adaptation of Vision-Language Foundation Model for Reliable Radiograph-Report Retrieval

Ahmad Elallaf, Yu Zhang, Yuktha Priya Masupalli, Jeong Yang, Young Lee, Zechun Cao, Gongbo Liang
Published 2026-02-17 21:20
This study presents MedProbCLIP, a probabilistic vision-language learning framework designed for the representation learning and retrieval of chest X-ray images and radiology reports. The framework utilizes Gaussian embeddings to capture uncertainty and improve the reliability of predictions in high-stakes biomedical applications. Evaluations on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate that MedProbCLIP outperforms existing models in retrieval accuracy and classification, while also enhancing calibration and robustness.
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Vision-language foundation models have emerged as powerful general-purpose representation learners with strong potential for multimodal understanding, but their deterministic embeddings often fail to provide the reliability required for high-stakes biomedical applications. This work introduces MedProbCLIP, a probabilistic vision-language learning framework for chest X-ray and radiology report representation learning and bidirectional retrieval. MedProbCLIP models image and text representations as Gaussian embeddings through a probabilistic contrastive objective that explicitly captures uncertainty and many-to-many correspondences between radiographs and clinical narratives. A variational information bottleneck mitigates overconfident predictions, while MedProbCLIP employs multi-view radiograph encoding and multi-section report encoding during training to provide fine-grained supervision for clinically aligned correspondence, yet requires only a single radiograph and a single report at inference. Evaluated on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, MedProbCLIP outperforms deterministic and probabilistic baselines, including CLIP, CXR-CLIP, and PCME++, in both retrieval and zero-shot classification. Beyond accuracy, MedProbCLIP demonstrates superior calibration, risk-coverage behavior, selective retrieval reliability, and robustness to clinically relevant corruptions, underscoring the value of probabilistic vision-language modeling for improving the trustworthiness and safety of radiology image-text retrieval systems.

ARXIV Cancer: brain tumor Method: deterministic feature extraction

BTReport: A Framework for Brain Tumor Radiology Report Generation with Clinically Relevant Features

Juampablo E. Heras Rivera, Dickson T. Chen, Tianyi Ren, Daniel K. Low, Asma Ben Abacha, Alberto Santamaria-Pang, Mehmet Kurt
Published 2026-02-17 20:55
The paper presents BTReport, an open-source framework designed for generating radiology reports specifically for brain tumors. It utilizes a two-step process that involves deterministic feature extraction for image analysis and the application of large language models for report structuring. The results indicate that the generated reports are interpretable and align more closely with clinical standards compared to existing methods, while also being predictive of important clinical outcomes.
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Recent advances in radiology report generation (RRG) have been driven by large paired image-text datasets; however, progress in neuro-oncology has been limited due to a lack of open paired image-report datasets. Here, we introduce BTReport, an open-source framework for brain tumor RRG that constructs natural language radiology reports using deterministically extracted imaging features. Unlike existing approaches that rely on large general-purpose or fine-tuned vision-language models for both image interpretation and report composition, BTReport performs deterministic feature extraction for image analysis and uses large language models only for syntactic structuring and narrative formatting. By separating RRG into a deterministic feature extraction step and a report generation step, the generated reports are completely interpretable and less prone to hallucinations. We show that the features used for report generation are predictive of key clinical outcomes, including survival and IDH mutation status, and reports generated by BTReport are more closely aligned with reference clinical reports than existing baselines for RRG. Finally, we introduce BTReport-BraTS, a companion dataset that augments BraTS imaging with synthetically generated radiology reports produced with BTReport. Code for this project can be found at https://github.com/KurtLabUW/BTReport.

ARXIV Cancer: cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma Method: Graph Transformers

Context-aware Skin Cancer Epithelial Cell Classification with Scalable Graph Transformers

Lucas Sancéré, Noémie Moreau, Katarzyna Bozek
Published 2026-02-17 18:17
This study presents a novel approach for classifying epithelial cells in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) using scalable Graph Transformers. The proposed method addresses the limitations of traditional image-based deep learning techniques by utilizing full-WSI cell graphs, which retain vital tissue-level context. The evaluation demonstrated that Graph Transformer models achieved higher balanced accuracies compared to conventional image-based methods, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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Whole-slide images (WSIs) from cancer patients contain rich information that can be used for medical diagnosis or to follow treatment progress. To automate their analysis, numerous deep learning methods based on convolutional neural networks and Vision Transformers have been developed and have achieved strong performance in segmentation and classification tasks. However, due to the large size and complex cellular organization of WSIs, these models rely on patch-based representations, losing vital tissue-level context. We propose using scalable Graph Transformers on a full-WSI cell graph for classification. We evaluate this methodology on a challenging task: the classification of healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), where both cell types exhibit very similar morphologies and are therefore difficult to differentiate for image-based approaches. We first compared image-based and graph-based methods on a single WSI. Graph Transformer models SGFormer and DIFFormer achieved balanced accuracies of $85.2 \pm 1.5$ ($\pm$ standard error) and $85.1 \pm 2.5$ in 3-fold cross-validation, respectively, whereas the best image-based method reached $81.2 \pm 3.0$. By evaluating several node feature configurations, we found that the most informative representation combined morphological and texture features as well as the cell classes of non-epithelial cells, highlighting the importance of the surrounding cellular context. We then extended our work to train on several WSIs from several patients. To address the computational constraints of image-based models, we extracted four $2560 \times 2560$ pixel patches from each image and converted them into graphs. In this setting, DIFFormer achieved a balanced accuracy of $83.6 \pm 1.9$ (3-fold cross-validation), while the state-of-the-art image-based model CellViT256 reached $78.1 \pm 0.5$.

ARXIV Cancer: unknown Method: multimodal learning

Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG: Towards Interpretable and Accurate Radiology Report Generation

Marco Salmè, Federico Siciliano, Fabrizio Silvestri, Paolo Soda, Rosa Sicilia, Valerio Guarrasi
Published 2026-02-17 15:18
This paper presents Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG (CEMRAG), a framework aimed at improving Radiology Report Generation (RRG) by integrating interpretable clinical concepts with multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The approach enhances both interpretability and factual accuracy in radiology reports, addressing the limitations of existing models that often sacrifice one for the other. Experiments demonstrate that CEMRAG consistently outperforms traditional RAG and concept-only methods in clinical accuracy and standard NLP metrics.
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Radiology Report Generation (RRG) through Vision-Language Models (VLMs) promises to reduce documentation burden, improve reporting consistency, and accelerate clinical workflows. However, their clinical adoption remains limited by the lack of interpretability and the tendency to hallucinate findings misaligned with imaging evidence. Existing research typically treats interpretability and accuracy as separate objectives, with concept-based explainability techniques focusing primarily on transparency, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods targeting factual grounding through external retrieval. We present Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG (CEMRAG), a unified framework that decomposes visual representations into interpretable clinical concepts and integrates them with multimodal RAG. This approach exploits enriched contextual prompts for RRG, improving both interpretability and factual accuracy. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray across multiple VLM architectures, training regimes, and retrieval configurations demonstrate consistent improvements over both conventional RAG and concept-only baselines on clinical accuracy metrics and standard NLP measures. These results challenge the assumed trade-off between interpretability and performance, showing that transparent visual concepts can enhance rather than compromise diagnostic accuracy in medical VLMs. Our modular design decomposes interpretability into visual transparency and structured language model conditioning, providing a principled pathway toward clinically trustworthy AI-assisted radiology.

ARXIV Cancer: unknown Method: multi-agent reinforcement learning

Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Radiology Report Generation: Radiologist-Like Workflow with Clinically Verifiable Rewards

Kaito Baba, Satoshi Kodera
Published 2026-02-17 12:48
The paper presents MARL-Rad, a multi-modal multi-agent reinforcement learning framework designed for radiology report generation. This approach coordinates multiple region-specific agents and a global integrating agent, optimizing their performance through clinically verifiable rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that MARL-Rad significantly improves clinically efficacy metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance in generating detailed and accurate radiology reports.
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We propose MARL-Rad, a novel multi-modal multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for radiology report generation that coordinates region-specific agents and a global integrating agent, optimized via clinically verifiable rewards. Unlike prior single-model reinforcement learning or post-hoc agentization of independently trained models, our method jointly trains multiple agents and optimizes the entire agent system through reinforcement learning. Experiments on the MIMIC-CXR and IU X-ray datasets show that MARL-Rad consistently improves clinically efficacy (CE) metrics such as RadGraph, CheXbert, and GREEN scores, achieving state-of-the-art CE performance. Further analyses confirm that MARL-Rad enhances laterality consistency and produces more accurate, detail-informed reports.

ARXIV Cancer: unknown Method: multi-agent reinforcement learning

Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Radiology Report Generation

Kaito Baba, Risa Kishikawa, Satoshi Kodera
Published 2026-02-17 12:48
The paper presents MARL-Rad, a multi-modal multi-agent reinforcement learning framework designed for radiology report generation. It optimizes the interpretation of chest X-rays by employing region-specific agents and a global integrating agent, using clinically verifiable rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that MARL-Rad enhances clinical efficacy metrics and produces reports that are comparable to ground-truth reports.
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We propose MARL-Rad, a multi-modal multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for radiology report generation that trains the entire agentic system on policy within its deployed radiology workflow. MARL-Rad addresses the limitation of post-hoc agentization, where fixed LLMs are organized into hand-designed agentic workflows without being optimized for their assigned roles. Our framework decomposes chest X-ray interpretation into region-specific agents and a global integrating agent, and jointly optimizes them using clinically verifiable rewards. Experiments on the MIMIC-CXR and IU X-ray datasets show that MARL-Rad consistently improves clinical efficacy metrics such as RadGraph, CheXbert, and GREEN scores, achieving state-of-the-art clinical efficacy performance. Further analyses show that MARL-Rad improves laterality consistency and produces more accurate and detailed reports. A blinded clinician evaluation further suggests that MARL-Rad produces reports clinically comparable to ground-truth reports.

ARXIV Cancer: non-small cell lung cancer Method: knowledge graph

Exploring Drug Safety Through Knowledge Graphs: Protein Kinase Inhibitors as a Case Study

David Jackson, Michael Gertz, Jürgen Hesser
Published 2026-02-17 12:30
This study presents a knowledge graph-based framework aimed at improving the prediction of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) by integrating diverse data sources, including drug-target data and clinical trial literature. The framework was applied to 400 protein kinase inhibitors, enabling the contextual comparison of drug efficacy and ADR prediction. A case study on non-small cell lung cancer demonstrated the framework's ability to identify established and candidate drugs, as well as tolerability differences among target communities.
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Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Existing prediction methods rely mainly on chemical similarity, machine learning on structured databases, or isolated target profiles, but often fail to integrate heterogeneous, partly unstructured evidence effectively. We present a knowledge graph-based framework that unifies diverse sources, drug-target data (ChEMBL), clinical trial literature (PubMed), trial metadata (ClinicalTrials.gov), and post-marketing safety reports (FAERS) into a single evidence-weighted bipartite network of drugs and medical conditions. Applied to 400 protein kinase inhibitors, the resulting network enables contextual comparison of efficacy (HR, PFS, OS), phenotypic and target similarity, and ADR prediction via target-to-adverse-event correlations. A non-small cell lung cancer case study correctly highlights established and candidate drugs, target communities (ERbB, ALK, VEGF), and tolerability differences. Designed as an orthogonal, extensible analysis and search tool rather than a replacement for current models, the framework excels at revealing complex patterns, supporting hypothesis generation, and enhancing pharmacovigilance. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/davidjackson99/PKI_KG.

ARXIV Cancer: breast cancer Method: foundation model

Scaling Ultrasound Volumetric Reconstruction via Mobile Augmented Reality

Kian Wei Ng, Yujia Gao, Deborah Khoo, Ying Zhen Tan, Chengzheng Mao, Haojie Cheng, Andrew Makmur, Kee Yuan Ngiam, Serene Goh, Eng Tat Khoo
Published 2026-02-17 09:59
This study introduces Mobile Augmented Reality Volumetric Ultrasound (MARVUS), a system aimed at improving the accuracy and reproducibility of volumetric assessments in oncologic diagnosis. By utilizing a foundation model, MARVUS enhances the performance of conventional ultrasound systems while minimizing hardware requirements. User studies demonstrated significant improvements in volume estimation accuracy and reduced inter-user variability among experienced clinicians. The findings indicate that MARVUS can effectively support ultrasound-based cancer screening and treatment planning.
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Accurate volumetric characterization of lesions is essential for oncologic diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment planning. While imaging modalities such as Computed Tomography provide high-quality 3D data, 2D ultrasound (2D-US) remains the preferred first-line modality for breast and thyroid imaging due to cost, portability, and safety factors. However, volume estimates derived from 2D-US suffer from high inter-user variability even among experienced clinicians. Existing 3D ultrasound (3D-US) solutions use specialized probes or external tracking hardware, but such configurations increase costs and diminish portability, constraining widespread clinical use. To address these limitations, we present Mobile Augmented Reality Volumetric Ultrasound (MARVUS), a resource-efficient system designed to increase accessibility to accurate and reproducible volumetric assessment. MARVUS is interoperable with conventional ultrasound (US) systems, using a foundation model to enhance cross-specialty generalization while minimizing hardware requirements relative to current 3D-US solutions. In a user study involving experienced clinicians performing measurements on breast phantoms, MARVUS yielded a substantial improvement in volume estimation accuracy (mean difference: 0.469 cm3) with reduced inter-user variability (mean difference: 0.417 cm3). Additionally, we prove that augmented reality (AR) visualizations enhance objective performance metrics and clinician-reported usability. Collectively, our findings suggests that MARVUS can enhance US-based cancer screening, diagnostic workflows, and treatment planning in a scalable, cost-conscious, and resource-efficient manner. Usage video demonstration available (https://youtu.be/m4llYcZpqmM).

ARXIV Cancer: skin cancer Method: Multi-Attention Integration Learning

Effective and Robust Multimodal Medical Image Analysis

Joy Dhar, Nayyar Zaidi, Maryam Haghighat
Published 2026-02-17 04:23
This paper presents a novel Multi-Attention Integration Learning (MAIL) network aimed at improving multimodal medical image analysis for conditions such as skin cancer and brain tumors. The proposed method addresses limitations of existing Multimodal Fusion Learning approaches by enhancing modality-specific pattern recognition and ensuring robustness against adversarial attacks. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MAIL and its robust variant outperform existing methods, achieving significant performance improvements while reducing computational costs.
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Multimodal Fusion Learning (MFL), leveraging disparate data from various imaging modalities (e.g., MRI, CT, SPECT), has shown great potential for addressing medical problems such as skin cancer and brain tumor prediction. However, existing MFL methods face three key limitations: a) they often specialize in specific modalities, and overlook effective shared complementary information across diverse modalities, hence limiting their generalizability for multi-disease analysis; b) they rely on computationally expensive models, restricting their applicability in resource-limited settings; and c) they lack robustness against adversarial attacks, compromising reliability in medical AI applications. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Multi-Attention Integration Learning (MAIL) network, incorporating two key components: a) an efficient residual learning attention block for capturing refined modality-specific multi-scale patterns and b) an efficient multimodal cross-attention module for learning enriched complementary shared representations across diverse modalities. Furthermore, to ensure adversarial robustness, we extend MAIL network to design Robust-MAIL by incorporating random projection filters and modulated attention noise. Extensive evaluations on 20 public datasets show that both MAIL and Robust-MAIL outperform existing methods, achieving performance gains of up to 9.34% while reducing computational costs by up to 78.3%. These results highlight the superiority of our approaches, ensuring more reliable predictions than top competitors. Code: https://github.com/misti1203/MAIL-Robust-MAIL.