Artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced numerous opportunities for human assistance and task automation in medicine. However, it suffers from poor generalization in the presence of shifts in the data distribution. In the context of AI-based computed tomography (CT) analysis, significant data distribution shifts can be caused by changes in scanner manufacturer, reconstruction technique or dose. AI harmonization techniques can address this problem by reducing distribution shifts caused by various acquisition settings. This paper presents an open-source benchmark dataset containing CT scans of an anthropomorphic phantom acquired with various scanners and settings, which purpose is to foster the development of AI harmonization techniques. Using a phantom allows fixing variations attributed to inter- and intra-patient variations. The dataset includes 1378 image series acquired with 13 scanners from 4 manufacturers across 8 institutions using a harmonized protocol as well as several acquisition doses. Additionally, we present a methodology, baseline results and open-source code to assess image- and feature-level stability and liver tissue classification, promoting the development of AI harmonization strategies.

PanTS is a large-scale, multi-institutional dataset curated to advance research in pancreatic CT analysis. It contains 36,390 CT scans from 145 medical centers, with expert-validated, voxel-wise annotations of over 993,000 anatomical structures, covering pancreatic tumors, pancreas head, body, and tail, and 24 surrounding anatomical structures such as vascular/skeletal structures and abdominal/thoracic organs. Each scan includes metadata such as patient age, sex, diagnosis, contrast phase, in-plane spacing, slice thickness, etc. AI models trained on PanTS achieve significantly better performance in pancreatic tumor detection, localization, and segmentation compared to those trained on existing public datasets. Our analysis indicates that these gains are directly attributable to the 16x larger-scale tumor annotations and indirectly supported by the 24 additional surrounding anatomical structures. As the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind, PanTS offers a new benchmark for developing and evaluating AI models in pancreatic CT analysis.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) imaging employed in lung cancer screening (LCS) programs is increasing in uptake worldwide. LCS programs herald a generational opportunity to simultaneously detect cancer and non-cancer-related early-stage lung disease. Yet these efforts are hampered by a shortage of radiologists to interpret scans at scale. Here, we present TANGERINE, a computationally frugal, open-source vision foundation model for volumetric LDCT analysis. Designed for broad accessibility and rapid adaptation, TANGERINE can be fine-tuned off the shelf for a wide range of disease-specific tasks with limited computational resources and training data. Relative to models trained from scratch, TANGERINE demonstrates fast convergence during fine-tuning, thereby requiring significantly fewer GPU hours, and displays strong label efficiency, achieving comparable or superior performance with a fraction of fine-tuning data. Pretrained using self-supervised learning on over 98,000 thoracic LDCTs, including the UK's largest LCS initiative to date and 27 public datasets, TANGERINE achieves state-of-the-art performance across 14 disease classification tasks, including lung cancer and multiple respiratory diseases, while generalising robustly across diverse clinical centres. By extending a masked autoencoder framework to 3D imaging, TANGERINE offers a scalable solution for LDCT analysis, departing from recent closed, resource-intensive models by combining architectural simplicity, public availability, and modest computational requirements. Its accessible, open-source lightweight design lays the foundation for rapid integration into next-generation medical imaging tools that could transform LCS initiatives, allowing them to pivot from a singular focus on lung cancer detection to comprehensive respiratory disease management in high-risk populations.

The limited availability of bronchoscopy images makes image synthesis particularly interesting for training deep learning models. Robust image translation across different domains -- virtual bronchoscopy, phantom as well as in-vivo and ex-vivo image data -- is pivotal for clinical applications. This paper proposes BronchoGAN introducing anatomical constraints for image-to-image translation being integrated into a conditional GAN. In particular, we force bronchial orifices to match across input and output images. We further propose to use foundation model-generated depth images as intermediate representation ensuring robustness across a variety of input domains establishing models with substantially less reliance on individual training datasets. Moreover our intermediate depth image representation allows to easily construct paired image data for training. Our experiments showed that input images from different domains (e.g. virtual bronchoscopy, phantoms) can be successfully translated to images mimicking realistic human airway appearance. We demonstrated that anatomical settings (i.e. bronchial orifices) can be robustly preserved with our approach which is shown qualitatively and quantitatively by means of improved FID, SSIM and dice coefficients scores. Our anatomical constraints enabled an improvement in the Dice coefficient of up to 0.43 for synthetic images. Through foundation models for intermediate depth representations, bronchial orifice segmentation integrated as anatomical constraints into conditional GANs we are able to robustly translate images from different bronchoscopy input domains. BronchoGAN allows to incorporate public CT scan data (virtual bronchoscopy) in order to generate large-scale bronchoscopy image datasets with realistic appearance. BronchoGAN enables to bridge the gap of missing public bronchoscopy images.

In recent years, machine learning and deep learning have shown potential for improving Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis, one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases. This comprehensive analysis examines machine learning and deep learning-based Parkinson's disease diagnosis using MRI, speech, and handwriting datasets. To thoroughly analyze PD, this study collected data from scientific literature, experimental investigations, publicly accessible datasets, and global health reports. This study examines the worldwide historical setting of Parkinson's disease, focusing on its increasing prevalence and inequities in treatment access across various regions. A comprehensive summary consolidates essential findings from clinical investigations and pertinent datasets related to Parkinson's disease management. The worldwide context, prospective treatments, therapies, and drugs for Parkinson's disease have been thoroughly examined. This analysis identifies significant research deficiencies and suggests future methods, emphasizing the necessity for more extensive and diverse datasets and improved model accessibility. The current study proposes the Meta-Park model for diagnosing Parkinson's disease, achieving training, testing, and validation accuracy of 97.67 %, 95 %, and 94.04 %. This method provides a dependable and scalable way to improve clinical decision-making in managing Parkinson's disease. This research seeks to provide innovative, data-driven decisions for early diagnosis and effective treatment by merging the proposed method with a thorough examination of existing interventions, providing renewed hope to patients and the medical community.

Deformable registration is essential in medical image analysis, especially for handling various multi- and mono-modal registration tasks in neuroimaging. Existing studies lack exploration of brain MR-CT registration, and face challenges in both accuracy and efficiency improvements of learning-based methods. To enlarge the practice of multi-modal registration in brain, we present SR-Reg, a new benchmark dataset comprising 180 volumetric paired MR-CT images and annotated anatomical regions. Building on this foundation, we introduce MambaMorph, a novel deformable registration network based on an efficient state space model Mamba for global feature learning, with a fine-grained feature extractor for low-level embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that MambaMorph surpasses advanced ConvNet-based and Transformer-based networks across several multi- and mono-modal tasks, showcasing impressive enhancements of efficacy and efficiency. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mileswyn/MambaMorph.

Although there are relatively few diverse, high-quality medical imaging datasets on which to train computer vision artificial intelligence models, even fewer datasets contain expertly classified observations that can be repurposed to train or test such models. The traditional annotation process is laborious and time-consuming. Repurposing annotations and consolidating similar types of annotations from disparate sources has never been practical. Until recently, the use of natural language processing to convert a clinical radiology report into labels required custom training of a language model for each use case. Newer technologies such as large language models have made it possible to generate accurate and normalized labels at scale, using only clinical reports and specific prompt engineering. The combination of automatically generated labels extracted and normalized from reports in conjunction with foundational image models provides a means to create labels for model training. This article provides a short history and review of the annotation and labeling process of medical images, from the traditional manual methods to the newest semiautomated methods that provide a more scalable solution for creating useful models more efficiently. <b>Keywords:</b> Feature Detection, Diagnosis, Semi-supervised Learning © RSNA, 2025.

Brain lesion segmentation is challenging in medical image analysis, aiming to delineate lesion regions precisely. Deep learning (DL) techniques have recently demonstrated promising results across various computer vision tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and image classification. This paper offers an overview of recent DL algorithms for brain tumor and stroke segmentation, drawing on literature from 2021 to 2024. It highlights the strengths, limitations, current research challenges, and unexplored areas in imaging-based brain lesion classification based on insights from over 250 recent review papers. Techniques addressing difficulties like class imbalance and multi-modalities are presented. Optimization methods for improving performance regarding computational and structural complexity and processing speed are discussed. These include lightweight neural networks, multilayer architectures, and computationally efficient, highly accurate network designs. The paper also reviews generic and latest frameworks of different brain lesion detection techniques and highlights publicly available benchmark datasets and their issues. Furthermore, open research areas, application prospects, and future directions for DL-based brain lesion classification are discussed. Future directions include integrating neural architecture search methods with domain knowledge, predicting patient survival levels, and learning to separate brain lesions using patient statistics. To ensure patient privacy, future research is anticipated to explore privacy-preserving learning frameworks. Overall, the presented suggestions serve as a guideline for researchers and system designers involved in brain lesion detection and stroke segmentation tasks.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used radiological modality renowned for its radiation-free, comprehensive insights into the human body, facilitating medical diagnoses. However, the drawback of prolonged scan times hinders its accessibility. The k-space undersampling offers a solution, yet the resultant artifacts necessitate meticulous removal during image reconstruction. Although deep learning (DL) has proven effective for fast MRI image reconstruction, its broader applicability across various imaging scenarios has been constrained. Challenges include the high cost and privacy restrictions associated with acquiring large-scale, diverse training data, coupled with the inherent difficulty of addressing mismatches between training and target data in existing DL methodologies. Here, we present a novel Physics-Informed Synthetic data learning Framework for fast MRI, called PISF. PISF marks a breakthrough by enabling generalizable DL for multi-scenario MRI reconstruction through a single trained model. Our approach separates the reconstruction of a 2D image into many 1D basic problems, commencing with 1D data synthesis to facilitate generalization. We demonstrate that training DL models on synthetic data, coupled with enhanced learning techniques, yields in vivo MRI reconstructions comparable to or surpassing those of models trained on matched realistic datasets, reducing the reliance on real-world MRI data by up to 96 %. With a single trained model, our PISF supports the high-quality reconstruction under 4 sampling patterns, 5 anatomies, 6 contrasts, 5 vendors, and 7 centers, exhibiting remarkable generalizability. Its adaptability to 2 neuro and 2 cardiovascular patient populations has been validated through evaluations by 10 experienced medical professionals. In summary, PISF presents a feasible and cost-effective way to significantly boost the widespread adoption of DL in various fast MRI applications.

Self-supervised learning has shown potential in enhancing deep learning methods, yet its application in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis remains underexplored. This study seeks to leverage large-scale, unlabeled public brain MRI datasets to improve the performance of deep learning models in various downstream tasks for the development of clinical decision support systems. To enhance training efficiency, data filtering methods based on image entropy and slice positions were developed, condensing a combined dataset of approximately 2 million images from fastMRI-brain, OASIS-3, IXI, and BraTS21 into a more focused set of 250 K images enriched with brain features. The Momentum Contrast (MoCo) v3 algorithm was then employed to learn these image features, resulting in robustly pretrained models specifically tailored to brain MRI. The pretrained models were subsequently evaluated in tumor classification, lesion detection, hippocampal segmentation, and image reconstruction tasks. The results demonstrate that our brain MRI-oriented pretraining outperformed both ImageNet pretraining and pretraining on larger multi-organ, multi-modality medical datasets, achieving a ∼2.8 % increase in 4-class tumor classification accuracy, a ∼0.9 % improvement in tumor detection mean average precision, a ∼3.6 % gain in adult hippocampal segmentation Dice score, and a ∼0.1 PSNR improvement in reconstruction at 2-fold acceleration. This study underscores the potential of self-supervised learning for brain MRI using large-scale, tailored datasets derived from public sources.