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May 13

MedMemoryBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory in Personalized Healthcare

The large-scale deployment of personalized healthcare agents demands memory mechanisms that are exceptionally precise, safe, and capable of long-term clinical tracking. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on daily open-domain conversations, failing to capture the high-stakes complexity of real-world medical applications. Motivated by the stringent production requirements of an industry-leading health management agent serving tens of millions of active users, we introduce MedMemoryBench. We develop a human-agent collaborative pipeline to synthesize highly realistic, long-horizon medical trajectories based on clinically grounded, synthetic patient archetypes. This process yields a massive, expertly validated dataset comprising approximately 2,000 sessions and 16,000 interaction turns. Crucially, MedMemoryBench departs from traditional static evaluations by pioneering an "evaluate-while-constructing" streaming assessment protocol, which precisely mirrors dynamic memory accumulation in production environments. Furthermore, we formalize and systematically investigate the critical phenomenon of memory saturation, where sustained information influx actively degrades retrieval and reasoning robustness. Comprehensive benchmarking reveals severe bottlenecks in mainstream architectures, particularly concerning complex medical reasoning and noise resilience. By exposing these fundamental flaws, MedMemoryBench establishes a vital foundation for developing robust, production-ready medical agents.

  • 13 authors
·
May 11

CholecTrack20: A Multi-Perspective Tracking Dataset for Surgical Tools

Tool tracking in surgical videos is essential for advancing computer-assisted interventions, such as skill assessment, safety zone estimation, and human-machine collaboration. However, the lack of context-rich datasets limits AI applications in this field. Existing datasets rely on overly generic tracking formalizations that fail to capture surgical-specific dynamics, such as tools moving out of the camera's view or exiting the body. This results in less clinically relevant trajectories and a lack of flexibility for real-world surgical applications. Methods trained on these datasets often struggle with visual challenges such as smoke, reflection, and bleeding, further exposing the limitations of current approaches. We introduce CholecTrack20, a specialized dataset for multi-class, multi-tool tracking in surgical procedures. It redefines tracking formalization with three perspectives: (i) intraoperative, (ii) intracorporeal, and (iii) visibility, enabling adaptable and clinically meaningful tool trajectories. The dataset comprises 20 full-length surgical videos, annotated at 1 fps, yielding over 35K frames and 65K labeled tool instances. Annotations include spatial location, category, identity, operator, phase, and scene visual challenge. Benchmarking state-of-the-art methods on CholecTrack20 reveals significant performance gaps, with current approaches (< 45\% HOTA) failing to meet the accuracy required for clinical translation. These findings motivate the need for advanced and intuitive tracking algorithms and establish CholecTrack20 as a foundation for developing robust AI-driven surgical assistance systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

TrackRAD2025 challenge dataset: Real-time tumor tracking for MRI-guided radiotherapy

Purpose: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualize anatomical motion is becoming increasingly important when treating cancer patients with radiotherapy. Hybrid MRI-linear accelerator (MRI-linac) systems allow real-time motion management during irradiation. This paper presents a multi-institutional real-time MRI time series dataset from different MRI-linac vendors. The dataset is designed to support developing and evaluating real-time tumor localization (tracking) algorithms for MRI-guided radiotherapy within the TrackRAD2025 challenge (https://trackrad2025.grand-challenge.org/). Acquisition and validation methods: The dataset consists of sagittal 2D cine MRIs in 585 patients from six centers (3 Dutch, 1 German, 1 Australian, and 1 Chinese). Tumors in the thorax, abdomen, and pelvis acquired on two commercially available MRI-linacs (0.35 T and 1.5 T) were included. For 108 cases, irradiation targets or tracking surrogates were manually segmented on each temporal frame. The dataset was randomly split into a public training set of 527 cases (477 unlabeled and 50 labeled) and a private testing set of 58 cases (all labeled). Data Format and Usage Notes: The data is publicly available under the TrackRAD2025 collection: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/4539. Both the images and segmentations for each patient are available in metadata format. Potential Applications: This novel clinical dataset will enable the development and evaluation of real-time tumor localization algorithms for MRI-guided radiotherapy. By enabling more accurate motion management and adaptive treatment strategies, this dataset has the potential to advance the field of radiotherapy significantly.

  • 28 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

Taming Modern Point Tracking for Speckle Tracking Echocardiography via Impartial Motion

Accurate motion estimation for tracking deformable tissues in echocardiography is essential for precise cardiac function measurements. While traditional methods like block matching or optical flow struggle with intricate cardiac motion, modern point tracking approaches remain largely underexplored in this domain. This work investigates the potential of state-of-the-art (SOTA) point tracking methods for ultrasound, with a focus on echocardiography. Although these novel approaches demonstrate strong performance in general videos, their effectiveness and generalizability in echocardiography remain limited. By analyzing cardiac motion throughout the heart cycle in real B-mode ultrasound videos, we identify that a directional motion bias across different views is affecting the existing training strategies. To mitigate this, we refine the training procedure and incorporate a set of tailored augmentations to reduce the bias and enhance tracking robustness and generalization through impartial cardiac motion. We also propose a lightweight network leveraging multi-scale cost volumes from spatial context alone to challenge the advanced spatiotemporal point tracking models. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our strategies significantly improves models' performances over their baselines, even for out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. For instance, EchoTracker boosts overall position accuracy by 60.7% and reduces median trajectory error by 61.5% across heart cycle phases. Interestingly, several point tracking models fail to outperform our proposed simple model in terms of tracking accuracy and generalization, reflecting their limitations when applied to echocardiography. Nevertheless, clinical evaluation reveals that these methods improve GLS measurements, aligning more closely with expert-validated, semi-automated tools and thus demonstrating better reproducibility in real-world applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

EchoTracker: Advancing Myocardial Point Tracking in Echocardiography

Tissue tracking in echocardiography is challenging due to the complex cardiac motion and the inherent nature of ultrasound acquisitions. Although optical flow methods are considered state-of-the-art (SOTA), they struggle with long-range tracking, noise occlusions, and drift throughout the cardiac cycle. Recently, novel learning-based point tracking techniques have been introduced to tackle some of these issues. In this paper, we build upon these techniques and introduce EchoTracker, a two-fold coarse-to-fine model that facilitates the tracking of queried points on a tissue surface across ultrasound image sequences. The architecture contains a preliminary coarse initialization of the trajectories, followed by reinforcement iterations based on fine-grained appearance changes. It is efficient, light, and can run on mid-range GPUs. Experiments demonstrate that the model outperforms SOTA methods, with an average position accuracy of 67% and a median trajectory error of 2.86 pixels. Furthermore, we show a relative improvement of 25% when using our model to calculate the global longitudinal strain (GLS) in a clinical test-retest dataset compared to other methods. This implies that learning-based point tracking can potentially improve performance and yield a higher diagnostic and prognostic value for clinical measurements than current techniques. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/riponazad/echotracker/.

  • 8 authors
·
May 13, 2024

STROKEVISION-BENCH: A Multimodal Video And 2D Pose Benchmark For Tracking Stroke Recovery

Despite advancements in rehabilitation protocols, clinical assessment of upper extremity (UE) function after stroke largely remains subjective, relying heavily on therapist observation and coarse scoring systems. This subjectivity limits the sensitivity of assessments to detect subtle motor improvements, which are critical for personalized rehabilitation planning. Recent progress in computer vision offers promising avenues for enabling objective, quantitative, and scalable assessment of UE motor function. Among standardized tests, the Box and Block Test (BBT) is widely utilized for measuring gross manual dexterity and tracking stroke recovery, providing a structured setting that lends itself well to computational analysis. However, existing datasets targeting stroke rehabilitation primarily focus on daily living activities and often fail to capture clinically structured assessments such as block transfer tasks. Furthermore, many available datasets include a mixture of healthy and stroke-affected individuals, limiting their specificity and clinical utility. To address these critical gaps, we introduce StrokeVision-Bench, the first-ever dedicated dataset of stroke patients performing clinically structured block transfer tasks. StrokeVision-Bench comprises 1,000 annotated videos categorized into four clinically meaningful action classes, with each sample represented in two modalities: raw video frames and 2D skeletal keypoints. We benchmark several state-of-the-art video action recognition and skeleton-based action classification methods to establish performance baselines for this domain and facilitate future research in automated stroke rehabilitation assessment.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 2, 2025

BleedOrigin: Dynamic Bleeding Source Localization in Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection via Dual-Stage Detection and Tracking

Intraoperative bleeding during Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) poses significant risks, demanding precise, real-time localization and continuous monitoring of the bleeding source for effective hemostatic intervention. In particular, endoscopists have to repeatedly flush to clear blood, allowing only milliseconds to identify bleeding sources, an inefficient process that prolongs operations and elevates patient risks. However, current Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods primarily focus on bleeding region segmentation, overlooking the critical need for accurate bleeding source detection and temporal tracking in the challenging ESD environment, which is marked by frequent visual obstructions and dynamic scene changes. This gap is widened by the lack of specialized datasets, hindering the development of robust AI-assisted guidance systems. To address these challenges, we introduce BleedOrigin-Bench, the first comprehensive ESD bleeding source dataset, featuring 1,771 expert-annotated bleeding sources across 106,222 frames from 44 procedures, supplemented with 39,755 pseudo-labeled frames. This benchmark covers 8 anatomical sites and 6 challenging clinical scenarios. We also present BleedOrigin-Net, a novel dual-stage detection-tracking framework for the bleeding source localization in ESD procedures, addressing the complete workflow from bleeding onset detection to continuous spatial tracking. We compare with widely-used object detection models (YOLOv11/v12), multimodal large language models, and point tracking methods. Extensive evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving 96.85% frame-level accuracy (pmleq8 frames) for bleeding onset detection, 70.24% pixel-level accuracy (leq100 px) for initial source detection, and 96.11% pixel-level accuracy (leq100 px) for point tracking.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

Simulation of Nanorobots with Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Cancer Cell Detection and Tracking

Nanorobots are a promising development in targeted drug delivery and the treatment of neurological disorders, with potential for crossing the blood-brain barrier (BBB). These small devices leverage advancements in nanotechnology and bioengineering for precise navigation and targeted payload delivery, particularly for conditions like brain tumors, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has improved the navigation and effectiveness of nanorobots, allowing them to detect and interact with cancer cells through biomarker analysis. This study presents a new reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimizing nanorobot navigation in complex biological environments, focusing on cancer cell detection by analyzing the concentration gradients of surrounding biomarkers. We utilize a computer simulation model to explore the behavior of nanorobots in a three-dimensional space with cancer cells and biological barriers. The proposed method uses Q-learning to refine movement strategies based on real-time biomarker concentration data, enabling nanorobots to autonomously navigate to cancerous tissues for targeted drug delivery. This research lays the groundwork for future laboratory experiments and clinical applications, with implications for personalized medicine and less invasive cancer treatments. The integration of intelligent nanorobots could revolutionize therapeutic strategies, reducing side effects and enhancing treatment effectiveness for cancer patients. Further research will investigate the practical deployment of these technologies in medical settings, aiming to unlock the full potential of nanorobotics in healthcare.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

From Classification to Clinical Insights: Towards Analyzing and Reasoning About Mobile and Behavioral Health Data With Large Language Models

Passively collected behavioral health data from ubiquitous sensors holds significant promise to provide mental health professionals insights from patient's daily lives; however, developing analysis tools to use this data in clinical practice requires addressing challenges of generalization across devices and weak or ambiguous correlations between the measured signals and an individual's mental health. To address these challenges, we take a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to synthesize clinically useful insights from multi-sensor data. We develop chain of thought prompting methods that use LLMs to generate reasoning about how trends in data such as step count and sleep relate to conditions like depression and anxiety. We first demonstrate binary depression classification with LLMs achieving accuracies of 61.1% which exceed the state of the art. While it is not robust for clinical use, this leads us to our key finding: even more impactful and valued than classification is a new human-AI collaboration approach in which clinician experts interactively query these tools and combine their domain expertise and context about the patient with AI generated reasoning to support clinical decision-making. We find models like GPT-4 correctly reference numerical data 75% of the time, and clinician participants express strong interest in using this approach to interpret self-tracking data.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 21, 2023

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue, their capabilities for effective management reasoning - including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription - remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) through a new LLM-based agentic system optimised for clinical management and dialogue, incorporating reasoning over the evolution of disease and multiple patient visit encounters, response to therapy, and professional competence in medication prescription. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini's long-context capabilities, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with relevant and up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialist physicians and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding of management plans in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. While AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE's strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

  • 20 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025

A Quantitative Evaluation of Dense 3D Reconstruction of Sinus Anatomy from Monocular Endoscopic Video

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.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

TemMed-Bench: Evaluating Temporal Medical Image Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Existing medical reasoning benchmarks for vision-language models primarily focus on analyzing a patient's condition based on an image from a single visit. However, this setting deviates significantly from real-world clinical practice, where doctors typically refer to a patient's historical conditions to provide a comprehensive assessment by tracking their changes over time. In this paper, we introduce TemMed-Bench, the first benchmark designed for analyzing changes in patients' conditions between different clinical visits, which challenges large vision-language models (LVLMs) to reason over temporal medical images. TemMed-Bench consists of a test set comprising three tasks - visual question-answering (VQA), report generation, and image-pair selection - and a supplementary knowledge corpus of over 17,000 instances. With TemMed-Bench, we conduct an evaluation of six proprietary and six open-source LVLMs. Our results show that most LVLMs lack the ability to analyze patients' condition changes over temporal medical images, and a large proportion perform only at a random-guessing level in the closed-book setting. In contrast, GPT o3, o4-mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet demonstrate comparatively decent performance, though they have yet to reach the desired level. Furthermore, we explore augmenting the input with both retrieved visual and textual modalities in the medical domain. We also show that multi-modal retrieval augmentation yields notably higher performance gains than no retrieval and textual retrieval alone across most models on our benchmark, with the VQA task showing an average improvement of 2.59%. Overall, we compose a benchmark grounded on real-world clinical practice, and it reveals LVLMs' limitations in temporal medical image reasoning, as well as highlighting the use of multi-modal retrieval augmentation as a potentially promising direction worth exploring to address this challenge.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025

MedSG-Bench: A Benchmark for Medical Image Sequences Grounding

Visual grounding is essential for precise perception and reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially in medical imaging domains. While existing medical visual grounding benchmarks primarily focus on single-image scenarios, real-world clinical applications often involve sequential images, where accurate lesion localization across different modalities and temporal tracking of disease progression (e.g., pre- vs. post-treatment comparison) require fine-grained cross-image semantic alignment and context-aware reasoning. To remedy the underrepresentation of image sequences in existing medical visual grounding benchmarks, we propose MedSG-Bench, the first benchmark tailored for Medical Image Sequences Grounding. It comprises eight VQA-style tasks, formulated into two paradigms of the grounding tasks, including 1) Image Difference Grounding, which focuses on detecting change regions across images, and 2) Image Consistency Grounding, which emphasizes detection of consistent or shared semantics across sequential images. MedSG-Bench covers 76 public datasets, 10 medical imaging modalities, and a wide spectrum of anatomical structures and diseases, totaling 9,630 question-answer pairs. We benchmark both general-purpose MLLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL) and medical-domain specialized MLLMs (e.g., HuatuoGPT-vision), observing that even the advanced models exhibit substantial limitations in medical sequential grounding tasks. To advance this field, we construct MedSG-188K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset tailored for sequential visual grounding, and further develop MedSeq-Grounder, an MLLM designed to facilitate future research on fine-grained understanding across medical sequential images. The benchmark, dataset, and model are available at https://huggingface.co/MedSG-Bench

  • 7 authors
·
May 17, 2025

Fine-tuning Segment Anything for Real-Time Tumor Tracking in Cine-MRI

In this work, we address the TrackRAD2025 challenge of real-time tumor tracking in cine-MRI sequences of the thoracic and abdominal regions under strong data scarcity constraints. Two complementary strategies were explored: (i) unsupervised registration with the IMPACT similarity metric and (ii) foundation model-based segmentation leveraging SAM 2.1 and its recent variants through prompt-based interaction. Due to the one-second runtime constraint, the SAM-based method was ultimately selected. The final configuration used SAM2.1 b+ with mask-based prompts from the first annotated slice, fine-tuned solely on the small labeled subset from TrackRAD2025. Training was configured to minimize overfitting, using 1024x1024 patches (batch size 1), standard augmentations, and a balanced Dice + IoU loss. A low uniform learning rate (0.0001) was applied to all modules (prompt encoder, decoder, Hiera backbone) to preserve generalization while adapting to annotator-specific styles. Training lasted 300 epochs (~12h on RTX A6000, 48GB). The same inference strategy was consistently applied across all anatomical sites and MRI field strengths. Test-time augmentation was considered but ultimately discarded due to negligible performance gains. The final model was selected based on the highest Dice Similarity Coefficient achieved on the validation set after fine-tuning. On the hidden test set, the model reached a Dice score of 0.8794, ranking 6th overall in the TrackRAD2025 challenge. These results highlight the strong potential of foundation models for accurate and real-time tumor tracking in MRI-guided radiotherapy.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025

Prediction of the motion of chest internal points using a recurrent neural network trained with real-time recurrent learning for latency compensation in lung cancer radiotherapy

During the radiotherapy treatment of patients with lung cancer, the radiation delivered to healthy tissue around the tumor needs to be minimized, which is difficult because of respiratory motion and the latency of linear accelerator systems. In the proposed study, we first use the Lucas-Kanade pyramidal optical flow algorithm to perform deformable image registration of chest computed tomography scan images of four patients with lung cancer. We then track three internal points close to the lung tumor based on the previously computed deformation field and predict their position with a recurrent neural network (RNN) trained using real-time recurrent learning (RTRL) and gradient clipping. The breathing data is quite regular, sampled at approximately 2.5Hz, and includes artificial drift in the spine direction. The amplitude of the motion of the tracked points ranged from 12.0mm to 22.7mm. Finally, we propose a simple method for recovering and predicting 3D tumor images from the tracked points and the initial tumor image based on a linear correspondence model and Nadaraya-Watson non-linear regression. The root-mean-square error, maximum error, and jitter corresponding to the RNN prediction on the test set were smaller than the same performance measures obtained with linear prediction and least mean squares (LMS). In particular, the maximum prediction error associated with the RNN, equal to 1.51mm, is respectively 16.1% and 5.0% lower than the maximum error associated with linear prediction and LMS. The average prediction time per time step with RTRL is equal to 119ms, which is less than the 400ms marker position sampling time. The tumor position in the predicted images appears visually correct, which is confirmed by the high mean cross-correlation between the original and predicted images, equal to 0.955.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 13, 2022

SoftTiger: A Clinical Foundation Model for Healthcare Workflows

We introduce SoftTiger, a clinical large language model (CLaM) designed as a foundation model for healthcare workflows. The narrative and unstructured nature of clinical notes is a major obstacle for healthcare intelligentization. We address a critical problem of structuring clinical notes into clinical data, according to international interoperability standards. We collect and annotate data for three subtasks, namely, international patient summary, clinical impression and medical encounter. We then supervised fine-tuned a state-of-the-art LLM using public and credentialed clinical data. The training is orchestrated in a way that the target model can first support basic clinical tasks such as abbreviation expansion and temporal information extraction, and then learn to perform more complex downstream clinical tasks. Moreover, we address several modeling challenges in the healthcare context, e.g., extra long context window. Our blind pairwise evaluation shows that SoftTiger outperforms other popular open-source models and GPT-3.5, comparable to Gemini-pro, with a mild gap from GPT-4. We believe that LLMs may become a step-stone towards healthcare digitalization and democratization. Therefore, we publicly release SoftTiger models at scales of 13 billion and 70 billion parameters, as well as datasets and code for our innovative scalable evaluation, hopefully, making a significant contribution to the healthcare industry.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 29, 2024

NOTE: Notable generation Of patient Text summaries through Efficient approach based on direct preference optimization

The discharge summary is a one of critical documents in the patient journey, encompassing all events experienced during hospitalization, including multiple visits, medications, tests, surgery/procedures, and admissions/discharge. Providing a summary of the patient's progress is crucial, as it significantly influences future care and planning. Consequently, clinicians face the laborious and resource-intensive task of manually collecting, organizing, and combining all the necessary data for a discharge summary. Therefore, we propose "NOTE", which stands for "Notable generation Of patient Text summaries through an Efficient approach based on direct preference optimization". NOTE is based on Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care- III dataset and summarizes a single hospitalization of a patient. Patient events are sequentially combined and used to generate a discharge summary for each hospitalization. In the present circumstances, large language models' application programming interfaces (LLMs' APIs) are widely available, but importing and exporting medical data presents significant challenges due to privacy protection policies in healthcare institutions. Moreover, to ensure optimal performance, it is essential to implement a lightweight model for internal server or program within the hospital. Therefore, we utilized DPO and parameter efficient fine tuning (PEFT) techniques to apply a fine-tuning method that guarantees superior performance. To demonstrate the practical application of the developed NOTE, we provide a webpage-based demonstration software. In the future, we will aim to deploy the software available for actual use by clinicians in hospital. NOTE can be utilized to generate various summaries not only discharge summaries but also throughout a patient's journey, thereby alleviating the labor-intensive workload of clinicians and aiming for increased efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

A Corpus for Detecting High-Context Medical Conditions in Intensive Care Patient Notes Focusing on Frequently Readmitted Patients

A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may have, much of the information is only present in the patient notes. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust algorithms to infer patients' conditions and treatments from their written notes. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for patient phenotyping, a task that is defined as the identification of whether a patient has a given medical condition (also referred to as clinical indication or phenotype) based on their patient note. Nursing Progress Notes and Discharge Summaries from the Intensive Care Unit of a large tertiary care hospital were manually annotated for the presence of several high-context phenotypes relevant to treatment and risk of re-hospitalization. This dataset contains 1102 Discharge Summaries and 1000 Nursing Progress Notes. Each Discharge Summary and Progress Note has been annotated by at least two expert human annotators (one clinical researcher and one resident physician). Annotated phenotypes include treatment non-adherence, chronic pain, advanced/metastatic cancer, as well as 10 other phenotypes. This dataset can be utilized for academic and industrial research in medicine and computer science, particularly within the field of medical natural language processing.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 6, 2020

Forecasting Clinical Risk from Textual Time Series: Structuring Narratives for Temporal AI in Healthcare

Clinical case reports encode temporal patient trajectories that are often underexploited by traditional machine learning methods relying on structured data. In this work, we introduce the forecasting problem from textual time series, where timestamped clinical findings -- extracted via an LLM-assisted annotation pipeline -- serve as the primary input for prediction. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including fine-tuned decoder-based large language models and encoder-based transformers, on tasks of event occurrence prediction, temporal ordering, and survival analysis. Our experiments reveal that encoder-based models consistently achieve higher F1 scores and superior temporal concordance for short- and long-horizon event forecasting, while fine-tuned masking approaches enhance ranking performance. In contrast, instruction-tuned decoder models demonstrate a relative advantage in survival analysis, especially in early prognosis settings. Our sensitivity analyses further demonstrate the importance of time ordering, which requires clinical time series construction, as compared to text ordering, the format of the text inputs that LLMs are classically trained on. This highlights the additional benefit that can be ascertained from time-ordered corpora, with implications for temporal tasks in the era of widespread LLM use.

Progress Note Understanding -- Assessment and Plan Reasoning: Overview of the 2022 N2C2 Track 3 Shared Task

Daily progress notes are common types in the electronic health record (EHR) where healthcare providers document the patient's daily progress and treatment plans. The EHR is designed to document all the care provided to patients, but it also enables note bloat with extraneous information that distracts from the diagnoses and treatment plans. Applications of natural language processing (NLP) in the EHR is a growing field with the majority of methods in information extraction. Few tasks use NLP methods for downstream diagnostic decision support. We introduced the 2022 National NLP Clinical Challenge (N2C2) Track 3: Progress Note Understanding - Assessment and Plan Reasoning as one step towards a new suite of tasks. The Assessment and Plan Reasoning task focuses on the most critical components of progress notes, Assessment and Plan subsections where health problems and diagnoses are contained. The goal of the task was to develop and evaluate NLP systems that automatically predict causal relations between the overall status of the patient contained in the Assessment section and its relation to each component of the Plan section which contains the diagnoses and treatment plans. The goal of the task was to identify and prioritize diagnoses as the first steps in diagnostic decision support to find the most relevant information in long documents like daily progress notes. We present the results of 2022 n2c2 Track 3 and provide a description of the data, evaluation, participation and system performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

Motion simulation of radio-labeled cells in whole-body positron emission tomography

Cell tracking is a subject of active research gathering great interest in medicine and biology. Positron emission tomography (PET) is well suited for tracking radio-labeled cells in vivo due to its exceptional sensitivity and whole-body capability. For validation, ground-truth data are desirable that realistically mimic the flow of cells in a clinical situation. This study develops a workflow (CeFloPS) for simulating moving radio-labeled cells in a human phantom. From the XCAT phantom, the blood vessels are reduced to nodal networks along which cells can move and distribute to organs and tissues. The movement is directed by the blood flow, which is calculated in each node using the Hagen-Pooiseuille equation and Kirchhoff's laws assuming laminar flow. Organs are voxelized and movement of cells from artery entry to vein exit is generated via a biased 3D random walk. The probabilities of cells moving or remaining in tissues are derived from rate constants of tracer kinetic-based compartment modeling. PET listmode data is generated using the Monte-Carlo simulation framework GATE based on the definition of a large-body PET scanner with cell paths as moving radioactive sources and the XCAT phantom providing attenuation data. From the flow simulation of 100,000 cells, 100 sample cells were further processed by GATE and listmode data was reconstructed into images for comparison. As demonstrated by comparisons of simulated and reconstructed cell distributions, CeFloPS is capable of simulating cell behavior in whole-body PET. It achieves this simulation in a way that is anatomically and physiologically reasonable, thereby providing valuable data for the development and validation of cell tracking algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark

This technical report introduces a Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark for evaluating language models in healthcare, addressing the crucial natural language processing (NLP) task of extracting structured information from clinical narratives to support applications like automated coding, clinical trial cohort identification, and clinical decision support. The leaderboard provides a standardized platform for assessing diverse language models, including encoder and decoder architectures, on their ability to identify and classify clinical entities across multiple medical domains. A curated collection of openly available clinical datasets is utilized, encompassing entities such as diseases, symptoms, medications, procedures, and laboratory measurements. Importantly, these entities are standardized according to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model, ensuring consistency and interoperability across different healthcare systems and datasets, and a comprehensive evaluation of model performance. Performance of models is primarily assessed using the F1-score, and it is complemented by various assessment modes to provide comprehensive insights into model performance. The report also includes a brief analysis of models evaluated to date, highlighting observed trends and limitations. By establishing this benchmarking framework, the leaderboard aims to promote transparency, facilitate comparative analyses, and drive innovation in clinical entity recognition tasks, addressing the need for robust evaluation methods in healthcare NLP.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 3

Training Models to Extract Treatment Plans from Clinical Notes Using Contents of Sections with Headings

Objective: Using natural language processing (NLP) to find sentences that state treatment plans in a clinical note, would automate plan extraction and would further enable their use in tools that help providers and care managers. However, as in the most NLP tasks on clinical text, creating gold standard to train and test NLP models is tedious and expensive. Fortuitously, sometimes but not always clinical notes contain sections with a heading that identifies the section as a plan. Leveraging contents of such labeled sections as a noisy training data, we assessed accuracy of NLP models trained with the data. Methods: We used common variations of plan headings and rule-based heuristics to find plan sections with headings in clinical notes, and we extracted sentences from them and formed a noisy training data of plan sentences. We trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models with the data. We measured accuracy of the trained models on the noisy dataset using ten-fold cross validation and separately on a set-aside manually annotated dataset. Results: About 13% of 117,730 clinical notes contained treatment plans sections with recognizable headings in the 1001 longitudinal patient records that were obtained from Cleveland Clinic under an IRB approval. We were able to extract and create a noisy training data of 13,492 plan sentences from the clinical notes. CNN achieved best F measures, 0.91 and 0.97 in the cross-validation and set-aside evaluation experiments respectively. SVM slightly underperformed with F measures of 0.89 and 0.96 in the same experiments. Conclusion: Our study showed that the training supervised learning models using noisy plan sentences was effective in identifying them in all clinical notes. More broadly, sections with informal headings in clinical notes can be a good source for generating effective training data.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 27, 2019

Temporal-spatial Correlation Attention Network for Clinical Data Analysis in Intensive Care Unit

In recent years, medical information technology has made it possible for electronic health record (EHR) to store fairly complete clinical data. This has brought health care into the era of "big data". However, medical data are often sparse and strongly correlated, which means that medical problems cannot be solved effectively. With the rapid development of deep learning in recent years, it has provided opportunities for the use of big data in healthcare. In this paper, we propose a temporal-saptial correlation attention network (TSCAN) to handle some clinical characteristic prediction problems, such as predicting death, predicting length of stay, detecting physiologic decline, and classifying phenotypes. Based on the design of the attention mechanism model, our approach can effectively remove irrelevant items in clinical data and irrelevant nodes in time according to different tasks, so as to obtain more accurate prediction results. Our method can also find key clinical indicators of important outcomes that can be used to improve treatment options. Our experiments use information from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-IV) database, which is open to the public. Finally, we have achieved significant performance benefits of 2.0\% (metric) compared to other SOTA prediction methods. We achieved a staggering 90.7\% on mortality rate, 45.1\% on length of stay. The source code can be find: https://github.com/yuyuheintju/TSCAN.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

PRISM: Patient Records Interpretation for Semantic Clinical Trial Matching using Large Language Models

Clinical trial matching is the task of identifying trials for which patients may be potentially eligible. Typically, this task is labor-intensive and requires detailed verification of patient electronic health records (EHRs) against the stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria of clinical trials. This process is manual, time-intensive, and challenging to scale up, resulting in many patients missing out on potential therapeutic options. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made automating patient-trial matching possible, as shown in multiple concurrent research studies. However, the current approaches are confined to constrained, often synthetic datasets that do not adequately mirror the complexities encountered in real-world medical data. In this study, we present the first, end-to-end large-scale empirical evaluation of clinical trial matching using real-world EHRs. Our study showcases the capability of LLMs to accurately match patients with appropriate clinical trials. We perform experiments with proprietary LLMs, including GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, as well as our custom fine-tuned model called OncoLLM and show that OncoLLM, despite its significantly smaller size, not only outperforms GPT-3.5 but also matches the performance of qualified medical doctors. All experiments were carried out on real-world EHRs that include clinical notes and available clinical trials from a single cancer center in the United States.

  • 13 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024 1

Surgical tool classification and localization: results and methods from the MICCAI 2022 SurgToolLoc challenge

The ability to automatically detect and track surgical instruments in endoscopic videos can enable transformational interventions. Assessing surgical performance and efficiency, identifying skilled tool use and choreography, and planning operational and logistical aspects of OR resources are just a few of the applications that could benefit. Unfortunately, obtaining the annotations needed to train machine learning models to identify and localize surgical tools is a difficult task. Annotating bounding boxes frame-by-frame is tedious and time-consuming, yet large amounts of data with a wide variety of surgical tools and surgeries must be captured for robust training. Moreover, ongoing annotator training is needed to stay up to date with surgical instrument innovation. In robotic-assisted surgery, however, potentially informative data like timestamps of instrument installation and removal can be programmatically harvested. The ability to rely on tool installation data alone would significantly reduce the workload to train robust tool-tracking models. With this motivation in mind we invited the surgical data science community to participate in the challenge, SurgToolLoc 2022. The goal was to leverage tool presence data as weak labels for machine learning models trained to detect tools and localize them in video frames with bounding boxes. We present the results of this challenge along with many of the team's efforts. We conclude by discussing these results in the broader context of machine learning and surgical data science. The training data used for this challenge consisting of 24,695 video clips with tool presence labels is also being released publicly and can be accessed at https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-surgtoolloc-2022.

  • 71 authors
·
May 11, 2023

A Multi-View Joint Learning Framework for Embedding Clinical Codes and Text Using Graph Neural Networks

Learning to represent free text is a core task in many clinical machine learning (ML) applications, as clinical text contains observations and plans not otherwise available for inference. State-of-the-art methods use large language models developed with immense computational resources and training data; however, applying these models is challenging because of the highly varying syntax and vocabulary in clinical free text. Structured information such as International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes often succinctly abstracts the most important facts of a clinical encounter and yields good performance, but is often not as available as clinical text in real-world scenarios. We propose a multi-view learning framework that jointly learns from codes and text to combine the availability and forward-looking nature of text and better performance of ICD codes. The learned text embeddings can be used as inputs to predictive algorithms independent of the ICD codes during inference. Our approach uses a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to process ICD codes, and Bi-LSTM to process text. We apply Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) to enforce the two views to learn a similar representation of each patient. In experiments using planned surgical procedure text, our model outperforms BERT models fine-tuned to clinical data, and in experiments using diverse text in MIMIC-III, our model is competitive to a fine-tuned BERT at a tiny fraction of its computational effort.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 27, 2023

PET2Rep: Towards Vision-Language Model-Drived Automated Radiology Report Generation for Positron Emission Tomography

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a cornerstone of modern oncologic and neurologic imaging, distinguished by its unique ability to illuminate dynamic metabolic processes that transcend the anatomical focus of traditional imaging technologies. Radiology reports are essential for clinical decision making, yet their manual creation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent advancements of vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential in medical applications, presenting a promising avenue for automating report generation. However, existing applications of VLMs in the medical domain have predominantly focused on structural imaging modalities, while the unique characteristics of molecular PET imaging have largely been overlooked. To bridge the gap, we introduce PET2Rep, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of general and medical VLMs for radiology report generation for PET images. PET2Rep stands out as the first dedicated dataset for PET report generation with metabolic information, uniquely capturing whole-body image-report pairs that cover dozens of organs to fill the critical gap in existing benchmarks and mirror real-world clinical comprehensiveness. In addition to widely recognized natural language generation metrics, we introduce a series of clinical efficiency metrics to evaluate the quality of radiotracer uptake pattern description in key organs in generated reports. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of 30 cutting-edge general-purpose and medical-specialized VLMs. The results show that the current state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on PET report generation task, falling considerably short of fulfilling practical needs. Moreover, we identify several key insufficiency that need to be addressed to advance the development in medical applications.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

HyperWalker: Dynamic Hypergraph-Based Deep Diagnosis for Multi-Hop Clinical Modeling across EHR and X-Ray in Medical VLMs

Automated clinical diagnosis remains a core challenge in medical AI, which usually requires models to integrate multi-modal data and reason across complex, case-specific contexts. Although recent methods have advanced medical report generation (MRG) and visual question answering (VQA) with medical vision-language models (VLMs), these methods, however, predominantly operate under a sample-isolated inference paradigm, as such processing cases independently without access to longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) or structurally related patient examples. This paradigm limits reasoning to image-derived information alone, which ignores external complementary medical evidence for potentially more accurate diagnosis. To overcome this limitation, we propose HyperWalker, a Deep Diagnosis framework that reformulates clinical reasoning via dynamic hypergraphs and test-time training. First, we construct a dynamic hypergraph, termed iBrochure, to model the structural heterogeneity of EHR data and implicit high-order associations among multimodal clinical information. Within this hypergraph, a reinforcement learning agent, Walker, navigates to and identifies optimal diagnostic paths. To ensure comprehensive coverage of diverse clinical characteristics in test samples, we incorporate a linger mechanism, a multi-hop orthogonal retrieval strategy that iteratively selects clinically complementary neighborhood cases reflecting distinct clinical attributes. Experiments on MRG with MIMIC and medical VQA on EHRXQA demonstrate that HyperWalker achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Bean-Young/HyperWalker

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 19

Foresight -- Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for Modelling of Patient Timelines using EHRs

Background: Electronic Health Records hold detailed longitudinal information about each patient's health status and general clinical history, a large portion of which is stored within the unstructured text. Existing approaches focus mostly on structured data and a subset of single-domain outcomes. We explore how temporal modelling of patients from free text and structured data, using deep generative transformers can be used to forecast a wide range of future disorders, substances, procedures or findings. Methods: We present Foresight, a novel transformer-based pipeline that uses named entity recognition and linking tools to convert document text into structured, coded concepts, followed by providing probabilistic forecasts for future medical events such as disorders, substances, procedures and findings. We processed the entire free-text portion from three different hospital datasets totalling 811336 patients covering both physical and mental health. Findings: On tests in two UK hospitals (King's College Hospital, South London and Maudsley) and the US MIMIC-III dataset precision@10 0.68, 0.76 and 0.88 was achieved for forecasting the next disorder in a patient timeline, while precision@10 of 0.80, 0.81 and 0.91 was achieved for forecasting the next biomedical concept. Foresight was also validated on 34 synthetic patient timelines by five clinicians and achieved relevancy of 97% for the top forecasted candidate disorder. As a generative model, it can forecast follow-on biomedical concepts for as many steps as required. Interpretation: Foresight is a general-purpose model for biomedical concept modelling that can be used for real-world risk forecasting, virtual trials and clinical research to study the progression of disorders, simulate interventions and counterfactuals, and educational purposes.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 13, 2022

Patient-Specific Autoregressive Models for Organ Motion Prediction in Radiotherapy

Radiotherapy often involves a prolonged treatment period. During this time, patients may experience organ motion due to breathing and other physiological factors. Predicting and modeling this motion before treatment is crucial for ensuring precise radiation delivery. However, existing pre-treatment organ motion prediction methods primarily rely on deformation analysis using principal component analysis (PCA), which is highly dependent on registration quality and struggles to capture periodic temporal dynamics for motion modeling.In this paper, we observe that organ motion prediction closely resembles an autoregressive process, a technique widely used in natural language processing (NLP). Autoregressive models predict the next token based on previous inputs, naturally aligning with our objective of predicting future organ motion phases. Building on this insight, we reformulate organ motion prediction as an autoregressive process to better capture patient-specific motion patterns. Specifically, we acquire 4D CT scans for each patient before treatment, with each sequence comprising multiple 3D CT phases. These phases are fed into the autoregressive model to predict future phases based on prior phase motion patterns. We evaluate our method on a real-world test set of 4D CT scans from 50 patients who underwent radiotherapy at our institution and a public dataset containing 4D CT scans from 20 patients (some with multiple scans), totaling over 1,300 3D CT phases. The performance in predicting the motion of the lung and heart surpasses existing benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing motion dynamics from CT images. These results highlight the potential of our method to improve pre-treatment planning in radiotherapy, enabling more precise and adaptive radiation delivery.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17, 2025

Am I eligible? Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment: the Patient's Point of View

Recruiting patients to participate in clinical trials can be challenging and time-consuming. Usually, participation in a clinical trial is initiated by a healthcare professional and proposed to the patient. Promoting clinical trials directly to patients via online recruitment might help to reach them more efficiently. In this study, we address the case where a patient is initiating their own recruitment process and wants to determine whether they are eligible for a given clinical trial, using their own language to describe their medical profile. To study whether this creates difficulties in the patient trial matching process, we design a new dataset and task, Natural Language Inference for Patient Recruitment (NLI4PR), in which patient language profiles must be matched to clinical trials. We create it by adapting the TREC 2022 Clinical Trial Track dataset, which provides patients' medical profiles, and rephrasing them manually using patient language. We also use the associated clinical trial reports where the patients are either eligible or excluded. We prompt several open-source Large Language Models on our task and achieve from 56.5 to 71.8 of F1 score using patient language, against 64.7 to 73.1 for the same task using medical language. When using patient language, we observe only a small loss in performance for the best model, suggesting that having the patient as a starting point could be adopted to help recruit patients for clinical trials. The corpus and code bases are all freely available on our Github and HuggingFace repositories.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals

Tracking biosignals is crucial for monitoring wellness and preempting the development of severe medical conditions. Today, wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals, creating the opportunity to monitor health status without disruption to one's daily routine. Despite widespread use of wearable devices and existing digital biomarkers, the absence of curated data with annotated medical labels hinders the development of new biomarkers to measure common health conditions. In fact, medical datasets are usually small in comparison to other domains, which is an obstacle for developing neural network models for biosignals. To address this challenge, we have employed self-supervised learning using the unlabeled sensor data collected under informed consent from the large longitudinal Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS) to train foundation models for two common biosignals: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded on Apple Watch. We curated PPG and ECG datasets from AHMS that include data from ~141K participants spanning ~3 years. Our self-supervised learning framework includes participant level positive pair selection, stochastic augmentation module and a regularized contrastive loss optimized with momentum training, and generalizes well to both PPG and ECG modalities. We show that the pre-trained foundation models readily encode information regarding participants' demographics and health conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that builds foundation models using large-scale PPG and ECG data collected via wearable consumer devices x2013 prior works have commonly used smaller-size datasets collected in clinical and experimental settings. We believe PPG and ECG foundation models can enhance future wearable devices by reducing the reliance on labeled data and hold the potential to help the users improve their health.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 8, 2023

Preserving Privacy, Increasing Accessibility, and Reducing Cost: An On-Device Artificial Intelligence Model for Medical Transcription and Note Generation

Background: Clinical documentation represents a significant burden for healthcare providers, with physicians spending up to 2 hours daily on administrative tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising solutions, but privacy concerns and computational requirements limit their adoption in healthcare settings. Objective: To develop and evaluate a privacy-preserving, on-device medical transcription system using a fine-tuned Llama 3.2 1B model capable of generating structured medical notes from medical transcriptions while maintaining complete data sovereignty entirely in the browser. Methods: We fine-tuned a Llama 3.2 1B model using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with LoRA on 1,500 synthetic medical transcription-to-structured note pairs. The model was evaluated against the base Llama 3.2 1B on two datasets: 100 endocrinology transcripts and 140 modified ACI benchmark cases. Evaluation employed both statistical metrics (ROUGE, BERTScore, BLEURT) and LLM-as-judge assessments across multiple clinical quality dimensions. Results: The fine-tuned OnDevice model demonstrated substantial improvements over the base model. On the ACI benchmark, ROUGE-1 scores increased from 0.346 to 0.496, while BERTScore F1 improved from 0.832 to 0.866. Clinical quality assessments showed marked reduction in major hallucinations (from 85 to 35 cases) and enhanced factual correctness (2.81 to 3.54 on 5-point scale). Similar improvements were observed on the internal evaluation dataset, with composite scores increasing from 3.13 to 4.43 (+41.5%). Conclusions: Fine-tuning compact LLMs for medical transcription yields clinically meaningful improvements while enabling complete on-device browser deployment. This approach addresses key barriers to AI adoption in healthcare: privacy preservation, cost reduction, and accessibility for resource-constrained environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

IryoNLP at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Tackling the Medical Error Detection & Correction Task On the Shoulders of Medical Agents

In natural language processing applied to the clinical domain, utilizing large language models has emerged as a promising avenue for error detection and correction on clinical notes, a knowledge-intensive task for which annotated data is scarce. This paper presents MedReAct'N'MedReFlex, which leverages a suite of four LLM-based medical agents. The MedReAct agent initiates the process by observing, analyzing, and taking action, generating trajectories to guide the search to target a potential error in the clinical notes. Subsequently, the MedEval agent employs five evaluators to assess the targeted error and the proposed correction. In cases where MedReAct's actions prove insufficient, the MedReFlex agent intervenes, engaging in reflective analysis and proposing alternative strategies. Finally, the MedFinalParser agent formats the final output, preserving the original style while ensuring the integrity of the error correction process. One core component of our method is our RAG pipeline based on our ClinicalCorp corpora. Among other well-known sources containing clinical guidelines and information, we preprocess and release the open-source MedWiki dataset for clinical RAG application. Our results demonstrate the central role of our RAG approach with ClinicalCorp leveraged through the MedReAct'N'MedReFlex framework. It achieved the ninth rank on the MEDIQA-CORR 2024 final leaderboard.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Tracking

Surgical scene segmentation is critical in computer-assisted surgery and is vital for enhancing surgical quality and patient outcomes. Recently, referring surgical segmentation is emerging, given its advantage of providing surgeons with an interactive experience to segment the target object. However, existing methods are limited by low efficiency and short-term tracking, hindering their applicability in complex real-world surgical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ReSurgSAM2, a two-stage surgical referring segmentation framework that leverages Segment Anything Model 2 to perform text-referred target detection, followed by tracking with reliable initial frame identification and diversity-driven long-term memory. For the detection stage, we propose a cross-modal spatial-temporal Mamba to generate precise detection and segmentation results. Based on these results, our credible initial frame selection strategy identifies the reliable frame for the subsequent tracking. Upon selecting the initial frame, our method transitions to the tracking stage, where it incorporates a diversity-driven memory mechanism that maintains a credible and diverse memory bank, ensuring consistent long-term tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReSurgSAM2 achieves substantial improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods, operating in real-time at 61.2 FPS. Our code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/ReSurgSAM2.

  • 7 authors
·
May 13, 2025 2

PMC-Patients: A Large-scale Dataset of Patient Notes and Relations Extracted from Case Reports in PubMed Central

Objective: Data unavailability has been one of the biggest barriers in clinical natural language processing. This paper is aimed at providing a large-scale and publicly available patient note dataset, named PMC-Patients, with relevant articles and similar patients annotations. The ultimate goal of PMC-Patients is to facilitate the development of retrieval-based clinical decision support systems. Materials and Methods: To collect PMC-Patients, we extract patient notes from case reports in PubMed Central by recognizing certain section patterns. Patient-article relevance and patient-patient similarity are annotated by citation relationships in PubMed. In addition, we perform three tasks with PMC-Patients to demonstrate its utility in providing clinical decision support for a given patient, including (1) classifying whether another patient is similar, (2) retrieving similar patients in PMC-Patients, and (3) retrieving relevant articles in PubMed. Results: We collect and release PMC-Patients under the CC BY-NC-SA license, which becomes the largest publicly available patient note dataset so far. PMC-Patients contains 167k patient notes that are annotated with 3.1M relevant articles and 293k similar patients. Qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal the high quality and richness of our dataset. Experiments show that classifying the similarity of patient pairs is relatively easy, but it is hard to retrieve similar patients or relevant articles for a given patient from a large set of candidates. Conclusion: We present PMC-Patients, a large-scale dataset of patient notes with high quality, easy access, diverse conditions, and rich annotations. The proposed dataset can also serve as a hard benchmark for evaluating retrieval-based clinical decision support systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2022

Clinical-Longformer and Clinical-BigBird: Transformers for long clinical sequences

Transformers-based models, such as BERT, have dramatically improved the performance for various natural language processing tasks. The clinical knowledge enriched model, namely ClinicalBERT, also achieved state-of-the-art results when performed on clinical named entity recognition and natural language inference tasks. One of the core limitations of these transformers is the substantial memory consumption due to their full self-attention mechanism. To overcome this, long sequence transformer models, e.g. Longformer and BigBird, were proposed with the idea of sparse attention mechanism to reduce the memory usage from quadratic to the sequence length to a linear scale. These models extended the maximum input sequence length from 512 to 4096, which enhanced the ability of modeling long-term dependency and consequently achieved optimal results in a variety of tasks. Inspired by the success of these long sequence transformer models, we introduce two domain enriched language models, namely Clinical-Longformer and Clinical-BigBird, which are pre-trained from large-scale clinical corpora. We evaluate both pre-trained models using 10 baseline tasks including named entity recognition, question answering, and document classification tasks. The results demonstrate that Clinical-Longformer and Clinical-BigBird consistently and significantly outperform ClinicalBERT as well as other short-sequence transformers in all downstream tasks. We have made our source code available at [https://github.com/luoyuanlab/Clinical-Longformer] the pre-trained models available for public download at: [https://huggingface.co/yikuan8/Clinical-Longformer].

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 27, 2022

Real-time respiratory motion forecasting with online learning of recurrent neural networks for accurate targeting in externally guided radiotherapy

In lung radiotherapy, infrared cameras can track reflective objects on the chest to estimate tumor motion due to breathing, but treatment system latencies hinder radiation beam precision. Real-time recurrent learning (RTRL) is a potential solution that can learn patterns within non-stationary respiratory data but has high complexity. This study assesses the capabilities of resource-efficient online RNN algorithms, namely unbiased online recurrent optimization (UORO), sparse-1 step approximation (SnAp-1), and decoupled neural interfaces (DNI) to forecast respiratory motion during radiotherapy treatment accurately. We use time series containing the 3D positions of external markers on the chest of healthy subjects. We propose efficient implementations for SnAp-1 and DNI that compress the influence and immediate Jacobian matrices and accurately update the linear coefficients used in credit assignment estimation, respectively. Data was originally sampled at 10Hz; we resampled it at 3.33Hz and 30Hz to analyze the effect of the sampling rate on performance. We use UORO, SnAp-1, and DNI to forecast each marker's 3D position with horizons h<=2.1s (the time interval in advance for which the prediction is made) and compare them with RTRL, least mean squares, kernel support vector regression, and linear regression. RNNs trained online achieved similar or better accuracy than most previous works using larger training databases and deep learning, even though we used only the first minute of each sequence to predict motion within that exact sequence. SnAp-1 had the lowest normalized root mean square errors (nRMSEs) averaged over the horizon values considered, equal to 0.335 and 0.157, at 3.33Hz and 10.0Hz, respectively. Similarly, UORO had the lowest nRMSE at 30Hz, equal to 0.086. DNI's inference time (6.8ms per time step at 30Hz, Intel Core i7-13700 CPU) was the lowest among the RNN methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3, 2024

IMPACT: A Generic Semantic Loss for Multimodal Medical Image Registration

Image registration is fundamental in medical imaging, enabling precise alignment of anatomical structures for diagnosis, treatment planning, image-guided treatment or longitudinal monitoring. This work introduces IMPACT (Image Metric with Pretrained model-Agnostic Comparison for Transmodality registration), a generic semantic similarity metric designed for seamless integration into diverse image registration frameworks (such as Elastix and Voxelmorph). It compares deep learning-based features extracted from medical images without requiring task-specific training, ensuring broad applicability across various modalities. By leveraging the features of the large-scale pretrained TotalSegmentator models and the ability to integrate Segment Anything Model (SAM) and other large-scale segmentation networks, this approach offers significant advantages. It provides robust, scalable, and efficient solutions for multimodal image registration. The IMPACT loss was evaluated on five challenging registration tasks involving thoracic CT/CBCT, and pelvic MR/CT datasets. Quantitative metrics, such as Target Registration Error and Dice Similarity Coefficient, demonstrated significant improvements in anatomical alignment compared to baseline methods. Qualitative analyses further confirmed the increased robustness of the proposed metric in the face of noise, artifacts, and modality variations. IMPACT's versatility and efficiency make it a valuable tool for advancing registration performance in clinical and research applications, addressing critical challenges in multimodal medical imaging.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

TimelyGPT: Extrapolatable Transformer Pre-training for Long-term Time-Series Forecasting in Healthcare

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision domains. However, the development of PTMs on healthcare time-series data is lagging behind.This underscores the limitations of the existing transformer-based architectures, particularly their scalability to handle large-scale time series and ability to capture long-term temporal dependencies. In this study, we present Timely Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TimelyGPT). TimelyGPT employs an extrapolatable position (xPos) embedding to encode trend and periodic patterns into time-series representations. It also integrates recurrent attention and temporal convolution modules to effectively capture global-local temporal dependencies. We evaluated TimelyGPT on two large-scale healthcare time series datasets corresponding to continuous biosignals and irregularly-sampled time series, respectively. Our experiments show that during pre-training, TimelyGPT excels in learning time-series representations from continuously monitored biosignals and irregularly-sampled time series data commonly observed in longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). In forecasting continuous biosignals, TimelyGPT achieves accurate extrapolation up to 6,000 timesteps of body temperature during the sleep stage transition, given a short look-up window (i.e., prompt) containing only 2,000 timesteps. For irregularly-sampled time series, TimelyGPT with a proposed time-specific inference demonstrates high top recall scores in predicting future diagnoses using early diagnostic records, effectively handling irregular intervals between clinical records. Together, we envision TimelyGPT to be useful in a broad spectrum of health domains, including long-term patient health state forecasting and patient risk trajectory prediction.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

Few-Shot Learning for Clinical Natural Language Processing Using Siamese Neural Networks

Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become an emerging technology in healthcare that leverages a large amount of free-text data in electronic health records (EHRs) to improve patient care, support clinical decisions, and facilitate clinical and translational science research. Recently, deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many clinical NLP tasks. However, training deep learning models usually requires large annotated datasets, which are normally not publicly available and can be time-consuming to build in clinical domains. Working with smaller annotated datasets is typical in clinical NLP and therefore, ensuring that deep learning models perform well is crucial for the models to be used in real-world applications. A widely adopted approach is fine-tuning existing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), but these attempts fall short when the training dataset contains only a few annotated samples. Few-Shot Learning (FSL) has recently been investigated to tackle this problem. Siamese Neural Network (SNN) has been widely utilized as an FSL approach in computer vision, but has not been studied well in NLP. Furthermore, the literature on its applications in clinical domains is scarce. In this paper, we propose two SNN-based FSL approaches for clinical NLP, including Pre-Trained SNN (PT-SNN) and SNN with Second-Order Embeddings (SOE-SNN). We evaluated the proposed approaches on two clinical tasks, namely clinical text classification and clinical named entity recognition. We tested three few-shot settings including 4-shot, 8-shot, and 16-shot learning. Both clinical NLP tasks were benchmarked using three PLMs, including BERT,BioBERT, and BioClinicalBERT. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed SNN-based FSL approaches in both NLP tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 31, 2022

Detection Recovery in Online Multi-Object Tracking with Sparse Graph Tracker

In existing joint detection and tracking methods, pairwise relational features are used to match previous tracklets to current detections. However, the features may not be discriminative enough for a tracker to identify a target from a large number of detections. Selecting only high-scored detections for tracking may lead to missed detections whose confidence score is low. Consequently, in the online setting, this results in disconnections of tracklets which cannot be recovered. In this regard, we present Sparse Graph Tracker (SGT), a novel online graph tracker using higher-order relational features which are more discriminative by aggregating the features of neighboring detections and their relations. SGT converts video data into a graph where detections, their connections, and the relational features of two connected nodes are represented by nodes, edges, and edge features, respectively. The strong edge features allow SGT to track targets with tracking candidates selected by top-K scored detections with large K. As a result, even low-scored detections can be tracked, and the missed detections are also recovered. The robustness of K value is shown through the extensive experiments. In the MOT16/17/20 and HiEve Challenge, SGT outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers with real-time inference speed. Especially, a large improvement in MOTA is shown in the MOT20 and HiEve Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/HYUNJS/SGT.

  • 4 authors
·
May 2, 2022

CancerGUIDE: Cancer Guideline Understanding via Internal Disagreement Estimation

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) provides evidence-based guidelines for cancer treatment. Translating complex patient presentations into guideline-compliant treatment recommendations is time-intensive, requires specialized expertise, and is prone to error. Advances in large language model (LLM) capabilities promise to reduce the time required to generate treatment recommendations and improve accuracy. We present an LLM agent-based approach to automatically generate guideline-concordant treatment trajectories for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a novel longitudinal dataset of 121 cases of NSCLC patients that includes clinical encounters, diagnostic results, and medical histories, each expertly annotated with the corresponding NCCN guideline trajectories by board-certified oncologists. Second, we demonstrate that existing LLMs possess domain-specific knowledge that enables high-quality proxy benchmark generation for both model development and evaluation, achieving strong correlation (Spearman coefficient r=0.88, RMSE = 0.08) with expert-annotated benchmarks. Third, we develop a hybrid approach combining expensive human annotations with model consistency information to create both the agent framework that predicts the relevant guidelines for a patient, as well as a meta-classifier that verifies prediction accuracy with calibrated confidence scores for treatment recommendations (AUROC=0.800), a critical capability for communicating the accuracy of outputs, custom-tailoring tradeoffs in performance, and supporting regulatory compliance. This work establishes a framework for clinically viable LLM-based guideline adherence systems that balance accuracy, interpretability, and regulatory requirements while reducing annotation costs, providing a scalable pathway toward automated clinical decision support.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025

Automatic Personalized Impression Generation for PET Reports Using Large Language Models

In this study, we aimed to determine if fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) can generate accurate, personalized impressions for whole-body PET reports. Twelve language models were trained on a corpus of PET reports using the teacher-forcing algorithm, with the report findings as input and the clinical impressions as reference. An extra input token encodes the reading physician's identity, allowing models to learn physician-specific reporting styles. Our corpus comprised 37,370 retrospective PET reports collected from our institution between 2010 and 2022. To identify the best LLM, 30 evaluation metrics were benchmarked against quality scores from two nuclear medicine (NM) physicians, with the most aligned metrics selecting the model for expert evaluation. In a subset of data, model-generated impressions and original clinical impressions were assessed by three NM physicians according to 6 quality dimensions (3-point scale) and an overall utility score (5-point scale). Each physician reviewed 12 of their own reports and 12 reports from other physicians. Bootstrap resampling was used for statistical analysis. Of all evaluation metrics, domain-adapted BARTScore and PEGASUSScore showed the highest Spearman's rank correlations (0.568 and 0.563) with physician preferences. Based on these metrics, the fine-tuned PEGASUS model was selected as the top LLM. When physicians reviewed PEGASUS-generated impressions in their own style, 89% were considered clinically acceptable, with a mean utility score of 4.08 out of 5. Physicians rated these personalized impressions as comparable in overall utility to the impressions dictated by other physicians (4.03, P=0.41). In conclusion, personalized impressions generated by PEGASUS were clinically useful, highlighting its potential to expedite PET reporting.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

Improving Clinical Document Understanding on COVID-19 Research with Spark NLP

Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, the number of scientific papers studying the virus has grown massively, leading to increased interest in automated literate review. We present a clinical text mining system that improves on previous efforts in three ways. First, it can recognize over 100 different entity types including social determinants of health, anatomy, risk factors, and adverse events in addition to other commonly used clinical and biomedical entities. Second, the text processing pipeline includes assertion status detection, to distinguish between clinical facts that are present, absent, conditional, or about someone other than the patient. Third, the deep learning models used are more accurate than previously available, leveraging an integrated pipeline of state-of-the-art pretrained named entity recognition models, and improving on the previous best performing benchmarks for assertion status detection. We illustrate extracting trends and insights, e.g. most frequent disorders and symptoms, and most common vital signs and EKG findings, from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). The system is built using the Spark NLP library which natively supports scaling to use distributed clusters, leveraging GPUs, configurable and reusable NLP pipelines, healthcare specific embeddings, and the ability to train models to support new entity types or human languages with no code changes.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 6, 2020

How Robust Are Large Language Models for Clinical Numeracy? An Empirical Study on Numerical Reasoning Abilities in Clinical Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for clinical question answering and decision support, yet safe deployment critically requires reliable handling of patient measurements in heterogeneous clinical notes. Existing evaluations of LLMs for clinical numerical reasoning provide limited operation-level coverage, restricted primarily to arithmetic computation, and rarely assess the robustness of numerical understanding across clinical note formats. We introduce ClinicNumRobBench, a benchmark of 1,624 context-question instances with ground-truth answers that evaluates four main types of clinical numeracy: value retrieval, arithmetic computation, relational comparison, and aggregation. To stress-test robustness, ClinicNumRobBench presents longitudinal MIMIC-IV vital-sign records in three semantically equivalent representations, including a real-world note-style variant derived from the Open Patients dataset, and instantiates queries using 42 question templates. Experiments on 14 LLMs show that value retrieval is generally strong, with most models exceeding 85% accuracy, while relational comparison and aggregation remain challenging, with some models scoring below 15%. Fine-tuning on medical data can reduce numeracy relative to base models by over 30%, and performance drops under note-style variation indicate LLM sensitivity to format. ClinicNumRobBench offers a rigorous testbed for clinically reliable numerical reasoning. Code and data URL are available on https://github.com/MinhVuong2000/ClinicNumRobBench.

  • 4 authors
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Apr 12

Extraction of Medication and Temporal Relation from Clinical Text using Neural Language Models

Clinical texts, represented in electronic medical records (EMRs), contain rich medical information and are essential for disease prediction, personalised information recommendation, clinical decision support, and medication pattern mining and measurement. Relation extractions between medication mentions and temporal information can further help clinicians better understand the patients' treatment history. To evaluate the performances of deep learning (DL) and large language models (LLMs) in medication extraction and temporal relations classification, we carry out an empirical investigation of MedTem project using several advanced learning structures including BiLSTM-CRF and CNN-BiLSTM for a clinical domain named entity recognition (NER), and BERT-CNN for temporal relation extraction (RE), in addition to the exploration of different word embedding techniques. Furthermore, we also designed a set of post-processing roles to generate structured output on medications and the temporal relation. Our experiments show that CNN-BiLSTM slightly wins the BiLSTM-CRF model on the i2b2-2009 clinical NER task yielding 75.67, 77.83, and 78.17 for precision, recall, and F1 scores using Macro Average. BERT-CNN model also produced reasonable evaluation scores 64.48, 67.17, and 65.03 for P/R/F1 using Macro Avg on the temporal relation extraction test set from i2b2-2012 challenges. Code and Tools from MedTem will be hosted at https://github.com/HECTA-UoM/MedTem

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

Diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports using span- and document-level characteristic classification

Clinical machine learning research and AI driven clinical decision support models rely on clinically accurate labels. Manually extracting these labels with the help of clinical specialists is often time-consuming and expensive. This study tests the feasibility of automatic span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports. We included 115,692 unstructured echocardiogram reports from the UMCU a large university hospital in the Netherlands. A randomly selected subset was manually annotated for the occurrence and severity of eleven commonly described cardiac characteristics. We developed and tested several automatic labelling techniques at both span and document levels, using weighted and macro F1-score, precision, and recall for performance evaluation. We compared the performance of span labelling against document labelling methods, which included both direct document classifiers and indirect document classifiers that rely on span classification results. The SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa.nl models outperformed all other span and document classifiers, respectively. The weighted F1-score varied between characteristics, ranging from 0.60 to 0.93 in SpanCategorizer and 0.96 to 0.98 in MedRoBERTa.nl. Direct document classification was superior to indirect document classification using span classifiers. SetFit achieved competitive document classification performance using only 10\% of the training data. Utilizing a reduced label set yielded near-perfect document classification results. We recommend using our published SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa.nl models for span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from Dutch echocardiography reports. For settings with limited training data, SetFit may be a promising alternative for document classification.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

In the Picture: Medical Imaging Datasets, Artifacts, and their Living Review

Datasets play a critical role in medical imaging research, yet issues such as label quality, shortcuts, and metadata are often overlooked. This lack of attention may harm the generalizability of algorithms and, consequently, negatively impact patient outcomes. While existing medical imaging literature reviews mostly focus on machine learning (ML) methods, with only a few focusing on datasets for specific applications, these reviews remain static -- they are published once and not updated thereafter. This fails to account for emerging evidence, such as biases, shortcuts, and additional annotations that other researchers may contribute after the dataset is published. We refer to these newly discovered findings of datasets as research artifacts. To address this gap, we propose a living review that continuously tracks public datasets and their associated research artifacts across multiple medical imaging applications. Our approach includes a framework for the living review to monitor data documentation artifacts, and an SQL database to visualize the citation relationships between research artifact and dataset. Lastly, we discuss key considerations for creating medical imaging datasets, review best practices for data annotation, discuss the significance of shortcuts and demographic diversity, and emphasize the importance of managing datasets throughout their entire lifecycle. Our demo is publicly available at http://inthepicture.itu.dk/.

  • 29 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025

From Questions to Clinical Recommendations: Large Language Models Driving Evidence-Based Clinical Decision Making

Clinical evidence, derived from rigorous research and data analysis, provides healthcare professionals with reliable scientific foundations for informed decision-making. Integrating clinical evidence into real-time practice is challenging due to the enormous workload, complex professional processes, and time constraints. This highlights the need for tools that automate evidence synthesis to support more efficient and accurate decision making in clinical settings. This study introduces Quicker, an evidence-based clinical decision support system powered by large language models (LLMs), designed to automate evidence synthesis and generate clinical recommendations modeled after standard clinical guideline development processes. Quicker implements a fully automated chain that covers all phases, from questions to clinical recommendations, and further enables customized decision-making through integrated tools and interactive user interfaces. To evaluate Quicker's capabilities, we developed the Q2CRBench-3 benchmark dataset, based on clinical guideline development records for three different diseases. Experimental results highlighted Quicker's strong performance, with fine-grained question decomposition tailored to user preferences, retrieval sensitivities comparable to human experts, and literature screening performance approaching comprehensive inclusion of relevant studies. In addition, Quicker-assisted evidence assessment effectively supported human reviewers, while Quicker's recommendations were more comprehensive and logically coherent than those of clinicians. In system-level testing, collaboration between a single reviewer and Quicker reduced the time required for recommendation development to 20-40 minutes. In general, our findings affirm the potential of Quicker to help physicians make quicker and more reliable evidence-based clinical decisions.

  • 16 authors
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May 15, 2025

Prediction of the Position of External Markers Using a Recurrent Neural Network Trained With Unbiased Online Recurrent Optimization for Safe Lung Cancer Radiotherapy

During lung radiotherapy, the position of infrared reflective objects on the chest can be recorded to estimate the tumor location. However, radiotherapy systems have a latency inherent to robot control limitations that impedes the radiation delivery precision. Prediction with online learning of recurrent neural networks (RNN) allows for adaptation to non-stationary respiratory signals, but classical methods such as RTRL and truncated BPTT are respectively slow and biased. This study investigates the capabilities of unbiased online recurrent optimization (UORO) to forecast respiratory motion and enhance safety in lung radiotherapy. We used 9 observation records of the 3D position of 3 external markers on the chest and abdomen of healthy individuals breathing during intervals from 73s to 222s. The sampling frequency was 10Hz, and the amplitudes of the recorded trajectories range from 6mm to 40mm in the superior-inferior direction. We forecast the 3D location of each marker simultaneously with a horizon value between 0.1s and 2.0s, using an RNN trained with UORO. We compare its performance with an RNN trained with RTRL, LMS, and offline linear regression. We provide closed-form expressions for quantities involved in the loss gradient calculation in UORO, thereby making its implementation efficient. Training and cross-validation were performed during the first minute of each sequence. On average over the horizon values considered and the 9 sequences, UORO achieves the lowest root-mean-square (RMS) error and maximum error among the compared algorithms. These errors are respectively equal to 1.3mm and 8.8mm, and the prediction time per time step was lower than 2.8ms (Dell Intel core i9-9900K 3.60 GHz). Linear regression has the lowest RMS error for the horizon values 0.1s and 0.2s, followed by LMS for horizon values between 0.3s and 0.5s, and UORO for horizon values greater than 0.6s.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 2, 2021

Vision-Language Models for Automated 3D PET/CT Report Generation

Positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) is essential in oncology, yet the rapid expansion of scanners has outpaced the availability of trained specialists, making automated PET/CT report generation (PETRG) increasingly important for reducing clinical workload. Compared with structural imaging (e.g., X-ray, CT, and MRI), functional PET poses distinct challenges: metabolic patterns vary with tracer physiology, and whole-body 3D contextual information is required rather than local-region interpretation. To advance PETRG, we propose PETRG-3D, an end-to-end 3D dual-branch framework that separately encodes PET and CT volumes and incorporates style-adaptive prompts to mitigate inter-hospital variability in reporting practices. We construct PETRG-Lym, a multi-center lymphoma dataset collected from four hospitals (824 reports w/ 245,509 paired PET/CT slices), and construct AutoPET-RG-Lym, a publicly accessible PETRG benchmark derived from open imaging data but equipped with new expert-written, clinically validated reports (135 cases). To assess clinical utility, we introduce PETRG-Score, a lymphoma-specific evaluation protocol that jointly measures metabolic and structural findings across curated anatomical regions. Experiments show that PETRG-3D substantially outperforms existing methods on both natural language metrics (e.g., +31.49\% ROUGE-L) and clinical efficacy metrics (e.g., +8.18\% PET-All), highlighting the benefits of volumetric dual-modality modeling and style-aware prompting. Overall, this work establishes a foundation for future PET/CT-specific models emphasizing disease-aware reasoning and clinically reliable evaluation. Codes, models, and AutoPET-RG-Lym will be released.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

3D Reconstruction of Coronary Vessel Trees from Biplanar X-Ray Images Using a Geometric Approach

X-ray angiography is widely used in cardiac interventions to visualize coronary vessels, assess integrity, detect stenoses and guide treatment. We propose a framework for reconstructing 3D vessel trees from biplanar X-ray images which are extracted from two X-ray videos captured at different C-arm angles. The proposed framework consists of three main components: image segmentation, motion phase matching, and 3D reconstruction. An automatic video segmentation method for X-ray angiography to enable semantic segmentation for image segmentation and motion phase matching. The goal of the motion phase matching is to identify a pair of X-ray images that correspond to a similar respiratory and cardiac motion phase to reduce errors in 3D reconstruction. This is achieved by tracking a stationary object such as a catheter or lead within the X-ray video. The semantic segmentation approach assigns different labels to different object classes enabling accurate differentiation between blood vessels, balloons, and catheters. Once a suitable image pair is selected, key anatomical landmarks (vessel branching points and endpoints) are matched between the two views using a heuristic method that minimizes reconstruction errors. This is followed by a novel geometric reconstruction algorithm to generate the 3D vessel tree. The algorithm computes the 3D vessel centrelines by determining the intersection of two 3D surfaces. Compared to traditional methods based on epipolar constraints, the proposed approach simplifies there construction workflow and improves overall accuracy. We trained and validated our segmentation method on 62 X-ray angiography video sequences. On the test set, our method achieved a segmentation accuracy of 0.703. The 3D reconstruction framework was validated by measuring the reconstruction error of key anatomical landmarks, achieving a reprojection errors of 0.62mm +/- 0.38mm.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

Medical Concept Representation Learning from Electronic Health Records and its Application on Heart Failure Prediction

Objective: To transform heterogeneous clinical data from electronic health records into clinically meaningful constructed features using data driven method that rely, in part, on temporal relations among data. Materials and Methods: The clinically meaningful representations of medical concepts and patients are the key for health analytic applications. Most of existing approaches directly construct features mapped to raw data (e.g., ICD or CPT codes), or utilize some ontology mapping such as SNOMED codes. However, none of the existing approaches leverage EHR data directly for learning such concept representation. We propose a new way to represent heterogeneous medical concepts (e.g., diagnoses, medications and procedures) based on co-occurrence patterns in longitudinal electronic health records. The intuition behind the method is to map medical concepts that are co-occuring closely in time to similar concept vectors so that their distance will be small. We also derive a simple method to construct patient vectors from the related medical concept vectors. Results: For qualitative evaluation, we study similar medical concepts across diagnosis, medication and procedure. In quantitative evaluation, our proposed representation significantly improves the predictive modeling performance for onset of heart failure (HF), where classification methods (e.g. logistic regression, neural network, support vector machine and K-nearest neighbors) achieve up to 23% improvement in area under the ROC curve (AUC) using this proposed representation. Conclusion: We proposed an effective method for patient and medical concept representation learning. The resulting representation can map relevant concepts together and also improves predictive modeling performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 11, 2016

Online Unsupervised Feature Learning for Visual Tracking

Feature encoding with respect to an over-complete dictionary learned by unsupervised methods, followed by spatial pyramid pooling, and linear classification, has exhibited powerful strength in various vision applications. Here we propose to use the feature learning pipeline for visual tracking. Tracking is implemented using tracking-by-detection and the resulted framework is very simple yet effective. First, online dictionary learning is used to build a dictionary, which captures the appearance changes of the tracking target as well as the background changes. Given a test image window, we extract local image patches from it and each local patch is encoded with respect to the dictionary. The encoded features are then pooled over a spatial pyramid to form an aggregated feature vector. Finally, a simple linear classifier is trained on these features. Our experiments show that the proposed powerful---albeit simple---tracker, outperforms all the state-of-the-art tracking methods that we have tested. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of different dictionary learning and feature encoding methods in the proposed tracking framework, and analyse the impact of each component in the tracking scenario. We also demonstrate the flexibility of feature learning by plugging it into Hare et al.'s tracking method. The outcome is, to our knowledge, the best tracker ever reported, which facilitates the advantages of both feature learning and structured output prediction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 7, 2013

NT-VOT211: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Night-time Visual Object Tracking

Many current visual object tracking benchmarks such as OTB100, NfS, UAV123, LaSOT, and GOT-10K, predominantly contain day-time scenarios while the challenges posed by the night-time has been less investigated. It is primarily because of the lack of a large-scale, well-annotated night-time benchmark for rigorously evaluating tracking algorithms. To this end, this paper presents NT-VOT211, a new benchmark tailored for evaluating visual object tracking algorithms in the challenging night-time conditions. NT-VOT211 consists of 211 diverse videos, offering 211,000 well-annotated frames with 8 attributes including camera motion, deformation, fast motion, motion blur, tiny target, distractors, occlusion and out-of-view. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest night-time tracking benchmark to-date that is specifically designed to address unique challenges such as adverse visibility, image blur, and distractors inherent to night-time tracking scenarios. Through a comprehensive analysis of results obtained from 42 diverse tracking algorithms on NT-VOT211, we uncover the strengths and limitations of these algorithms, highlighting opportunities for enhancements in visual object tracking, particularly in environments with suboptimal lighting. Besides, a leaderboard for revealing performance rankings, annotation tools, comprehensive meta-information and all the necessary code for reproducibility of results is made publicly available. We believe that our NT-VOT211 benchmark will not only be instrumental in facilitating field deployment of VOT algorithms, but will also help VOT enhancements and it will unlock new real-world tracking applications. Our dataset and other assets can be found at: {https://github.com/LiuYuML/NV-VOT211.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 26, 2024

Cost-effectiveness analysis for therapy sequence in advanced cancer: A microsimulation approach with application to metastatic prostate cancer

Purpose. Patients with advanced cancer may undergo multiple lines of treatment, switching therapies as their disease progresses. Motivated by a study of metastatic prostate cancer, we develop a microsimulation framework to study therapy sequence. Methods. We propose a discrete-time state transition model to study two lines of anti-cancer therapy. Based on digitized published progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) curves, we infer event types (progression or death), and estimate transition probabilities using cumulative incidence functions with competing risks. Our model incorporates within-patient dependence over time, such that response to first-line therapy informs subsequent event probabilities. Parameters governing the degree of within-patient dependence can be used to calibrate the model-based results to those of a target trial. We demonstrate these methods in a study of two therapy sequences for metastatic prostate cancer, where Docetaxel (DCT) and Abiraterone Acetate (AA) are both appropriate for use in either first or second line treatment. We assess costs, Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) for two treatment strategies: DCT then AA vs AA then DCT. Results. Using digitized survival curves from relevant clinical trials, we identified 8.6-13.9% of PFS times that should be categorized as deaths, allowing for estimation of cumulative incidence functions. Models assuming within-patient independence overestimated OS time, corrected with our calibration approach. Correction resulted in meaningful changes in the difference in QALYs between treatment strategies (0.07 vs 0.15) and the ICER (-\76,836/QALY vs -21,030/QALY). Conclusions. Microsimulation models can be successfully used to study cost-effectiveness of therapy sequences, taking care to account correctly for within-patient dependence.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 10, 2022

MambaTrack: A Simple Baseline for Multiple Object Tracking with State Space Model

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 17, 2024

On-device Computation of Single-lead ECG Parameters for Real-time Remote Cardiac Health Assessment: A Real-world Validation Study

Accurate, continuous out-of-hospital electrocardiogram (ECG) parameter measurement is vital for real-time cardiac health monitoring and telemedicine. On-device computation of single-lead ECG parameters enables timely assessment without reliance on centralized data processing, advancing personalized, ubiquitous cardiac care-yet comprehensive validation across heterogeneous real-world populations remains limited. This study validated the on-device algorithm FeatureDB (https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/FeatureDB) using two datasets: HeartVoice-ECG-lite (369 participants with single-lead ECGs annotated by two physicians) and PTB-XL/PTB-XL+ (21,354 patients with 12-lead ECGs and physicians' diagnostic annotations). FeatureDB computed PR, QT, and QTc intervals, with accuracy evaluated against physician annotations via mean absolute error (MAE), correlation analysis, and Bland-Altman analysis. Diagnostic performance for first-degree atrioventricular block (AVBI, PR-based) and long QT syndrome (LQT, QTc-based) was benchmarked against commercial 12-lead systems (12SL, Uni-G) and open-source algorithm Deli, using AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Results showed high concordance with expert annotations (Pearson correlations: 0.836-0.960), MAEs matching inter-observer variability, and minimal bias. AVBI AUC reached 0.787 (12SL: 0.859; Uni-G: 0.812; Deli: 0.501); LQT AUC was 0.684 (12SL: 0.716; Uni-G: 0.605; Deli: 0.569)-comparable to commercial tools and superior to open-source alternatives. FeatureDB delivers physician-level parameter accuracy and commercial-grade abnormality detection via single-lead devices, supporting scalable telemedicine, decentralized cardiac screening, and continuous monitoring in community and outpatient settings.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 21, 2025

WiNGPT-3.0 Technical Report

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant limitations, notably in structured, interpretable, and verifiable medical reasoning, alongside practical deployment challenges related to computational resources and data privacy. This report focused on the development of WiNGPT-3.0, the 32-billion parameter LLMs, engineered with the objective of enhancing its capacity for medical reasoning and exploring its potential for effective integration within healthcare IT infrastructures. The broader aim is to advance towards clinically applicable models. The approach involved a multi-stage training pipeline tailored for general, medical, and clinical reasoning. This pipeline incorporated supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging curated Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) datasets, auxiliary reward models, and an evidence-based diagnostic chain simulation. WiNGPT-3.0 demonstrated strong performance: specific model variants achieved scores of 66.6 on MedCalc and 87.1 on MedQA-USMLE. Furthermore, targeted training improved performance on a clinical reasoning task from a baseline score of 58.1 to 62.5. These findings suggest that reinforcement learning, even when applied with a limited dataset of only a few thousand examples, can enhance medical reasoning accuracy. Crucially, this demonstration of RL's efficacy with limited data and computation paves the way for more trustworthy and practically deployable LLMs within clinical workflows and health information infrastructures.

  • 13 authors
·
May 22, 2025

Biomed-Enriched: A Biomedical Dataset Enriched with LLMs for Pretraining and Extracting Rare and Hidden Content

We introduce Biomed-Enriched, a biomedical text dataset constructed from PubMed via a two-stage annotation process. In the first stage, a large language model annotates 400K paragraphs from PubMed scientific articles, assigning scores for their type (review, study, clinical case, other), domain (clinical, biomedical, other), and educational quality. The educational quality score (rated 1 to 5) estimates how useful a paragraph is for college-level learning. These annotations are then used to fine-tune a small language model, which propagates the labels across the full PMC-OA corpus. The resulting metadata allows us to extract refined subsets, including 2M clinical case paragraphs with over 450K high-quality ones from articles with commercial-use licenses, and to construct several variants via quality filtering and domain upsampling. Clinical text is typically difficult to access due to privacy constraints, as hospital records cannot be publicly shared. Hence, our dataset provides an alternative large-scale, openly available collection of clinical cases from PubMed, making it a valuable resource for biomedical and clinical NLP. Preliminary continual-pretraining experiments with OLMo2 suggest these curated subsets enable targeted improvements, with clinical upsampling boosting performance by ~5% on MMLU ProfMed and educational quality filtering improving MedQA and MedMCQA by ~1%. Combinations of these techniques led to faster convergence, reaching same performance with a third of training tokens, indicating potential for more efficient and effective biomedical pretraining strategies.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025 1

EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models

While the general machine learning (ML) community has benefited from public datasets, tasks, and models, the progress of ML in healthcare has been hampered by a lack of such shared assets. The success of foundation models creates new challenges for healthcare ML by requiring access to shared pretrained models to validate performance benefits. We help address these challenges through three contributions. First, we publish a new dataset, EHRSHOT, which contains deidentified structured data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of 6,739 patients from Stanford Medicine. Unlike MIMIC-III/IV and other popular EHR datasets, EHRSHOT is longitudinal and not restricted to ICU/ED patients. Second, we publish the weights of CLMBR-T-base, a 141M parameter clinical foundation model pretrained on the structured EHR data of 2.57M patients. We are one of the first to fully release such a model for coded EHR data; in contrast, most prior models released for clinical data (e.g. GatorTron, ClinicalBERT) only work with unstructured text and cannot process the rich, structured data within an EHR. We provide an end-to-end pipeline for the community to validate and build upon its performance. Third, we define 15 few-shot clinical prediction tasks, enabling evaluation of foundation models on benefits such as sample efficiency and task adaptation. Our model and dataset are available via a research data use agreement from the Stanford AIMI Center. Code to reproduce our results are available at our Github repo: https://github.com/som-shahlab/ehrshot-benchmark

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 5, 2023

AgentMD: Empowering Language Agents for Risk Prediction with Large-Scale Clinical Tool Learning

Clinical calculators play a vital role in healthcare by offering accurate evidence-based predictions for various purposes such as prognosis. Nevertheless, their widespread utilization is frequently hindered by usability challenges, poor dissemination, and restricted functionality. Augmenting large language models with extensive collections of clinical calculators presents an opportunity to overcome these obstacles and improve workflow efficiency, but the scalability of the manual curation process poses a significant challenge. In response, we introduce AgentMD, a novel language agent capable of curating and applying clinical calculators across various clinical contexts. Using the published literature, AgentMD has automatically curated a collection of 2,164 diverse clinical calculators with executable functions and structured documentation, collectively named RiskCalcs. Manual evaluations show that RiskCalcs tools achieve an accuracy of over 80% on three quality metrics. At inference time, AgentMD can automatically select and apply the relevant RiskCalcs tools given any patient description. On the newly established RiskQA benchmark, AgentMD significantly outperforms chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-4 (87.7% vs. 40.9% in accuracy). Additionally, we also applied AgentMD to real-world clinical notes for analyzing both population-level and risk-level patient characteristics. In summary, our study illustrates the utility of language agents augmented with clinical calculators for healthcare analytics and patient care.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

A medical coding language model trained on clinical narratives from a population-wide cohort of 1.8 million patients

Medical coding translates clinical documentation into standardized codes for billing, research, and public health, but manual coding is time-consuming and error-prone. Existing automation efforts rely on small datasets that poorly represent real-world patient heterogeneity. We trained a language model on 5.8 million electronic health records from 1.8 million patients across nearly all specialties in Eastern Denmark (2006--2016) to predict ICD-10 codes from clinical notes, medications, and laboratory results. Evaluated on 270,000 held-out patients, the model achieved a micro F1 of 71.8% and a top-10 recall of 95.5%. Performance varied by specialty (F1: 53--91%), with higher scores in specialties with well-defined diagnostic criteria. Codes appearing predominantly as secondary diagnoses had markedly lower F1 scores. For three such codes (suicide-related behaviors, weight disorders, and hypertension), the model identified thousands of uncoded cases, of which 76-86% were confirmed valid upon manual review, suggesting systematic under-coding rather than model error. These findings suggest under-coding of secondary diagnoses in Eastern Denmark during this period, with potential implications for epidemiological research, public health surveillance, and understanding of multimorbidity. Similar time constraints and reimbursement structures in other healthcare systems suggest this may not be isolated to this dataset. The model can automate coding for approximately 50% of cases and provide accurate suggestions for most others, and may offer a practical solution to help capture missed secondary conditions.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 2

Coping with Information Loss and the Use of Auxiliary Sources of Data: A Report from the NISS Ingram Olkin Forum Series on Unplanned Clinical Trial Disruptions

Clinical trials disruption has always represented a non negligible part of the ending of interventional studies. While the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to an impressive and unprecedented initiation of clinical research, it has also led to considerable disruption of clinical trials in other disease areas, with around 80% of non-COVID-19 trials stopped or interrupted during the pandemic. In many cases the disrupted trials will not have the planned statistical power necessary to yield interpretable results. This paper describes methods to compensate for the information loss arising from trial disruptions by incorporating additional information available from auxiliary data sources. The methods described include the use of auxiliary data on baseline and early outcome data available from the trial itself and frequentist and Bayesian approaches for the incorporation of information from external data sources. The methods are illustrated by application to the analysis of artificial data based on the Primary care pediatrics Learning Activity Nutrition (PLAN) study, a clinical trial assessing a diet and exercise intervention for overweight children, that was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We show how all of the methods proposed lead to an increase in precision relative to use of complete case data only.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 22, 2022

Cross-Phase Mutual Learning Framework for Pulmonary Embolism Identification on Non-Contrast CT Scans

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a life-threatening condition where rapid and accurate diagnosis is imperative yet difficult due to predominantly atypical symptomatology. Computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) is acknowledged as the gold standard imaging tool in clinics, yet it can be contraindicated for emergency department (ED) patients and represents an onerous procedure, thus necessitating PE identification through non-contrast CT (NCT) scans. In this work, we explore the feasibility of applying a deep-learning approach to NCT scans for PE identification. We propose a novel Cross-Phase Mutual learNing framework (CPMN) that fosters knowledge transfer from CTPA to NCT, while concurrently conducting embolism segmentation and abnormality classification in a multi-task manner. The proposed CPMN leverages the Inter-Feature Alignment (IFA) strategy that enhances spatial contiguity and mutual learning between the dual-pathway network, while the Intra-Feature Discrepancy (IFD) strategy can facilitate precise segmentation of PE against complex backgrounds for single-pathway networks. For a comprehensive assessment of the proposed approach, a large-scale dual-phase dataset containing 334 PE patients and 1,105 normal subjects has been established. Experimental results demonstrate that CPMN achieves the leading identification performance, which is 95.4\% and 99.6\% in patient-level sensitivity and specificity on NCT scans, indicating the potential of our approach as an economical, accessible, and precise tool for PE identification in clinical practice.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

LiveMedBench: A Contamination-Free Medical Benchmark for LLMs with Automated Rubric Evaluation

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes clinical settings demands rigorous and reliable evaluation. However, existing medical benchmarks remain static, suffering from two critical limitations: (1) data contamination, where test sets inadvertently leak into training corpora, leading to inflated performance estimates; and (2) temporal misalignment, failing to capture the rapid evolution of medical knowledge. Furthermore, current evaluation metrics for open-ended clinical reasoning often rely on either shallow lexical overlap (e.g., ROUGE) or subjective LLM-as-a-Judge scoring, both inadequate for verifying clinical correctness. To bridge these gaps, we introduce LiveMedBench, a continuously updated, contamination-free, and rubric-based benchmark that weekly harvests real-world clinical cases from online medical communities, ensuring strict temporal separation from model training data. We propose a Multi-Agent Clinical Curation Framework that filters raw data noise and validates clinical integrity against evidence-based medical principles. For evaluation, we develop an Automated Rubric-based Evaluation Framework that decomposes physician responses into granular, case-specific criteria, achieving substantially stronger alignment with expert physicians than LLM-as-a-Judge. To date, LiveMedBench comprises 2,756 real-world cases spanning 38 medical specialties and multiple languages, paired with 16,702 unique evaluation criteria. Extensive evaluation of 38 LLMs reveals that even the best-performing model achieves only 39.2%, and 84% of models exhibit performance degradation on post-cutoff cases, confirming pervasive data contamination risks. Error analysis further identifies contextual application-not factual knowledge-as the dominant bottleneck, with 35-48% of failures stemming from the inability to tailor medical knowledge to patient-specific constraints.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 10 2