Minh Chu Xuan, Tien-Phat Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Dinh Viet Sang, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep, Trung Le. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

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

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

Automatic analysis of colonoscopy images has been an active field of research motivated by the importance of early detection of precancerous polyps. However, detecting polyps during the live examination can be challenging due to various factors such as variation of skills and experience among the endoscopists, lack of attentiveness, and fatigue leading to a high polyp miss-rate. Therefore, there is a need for an automated system that can flag missed polyps during the examination and improve patient care. Deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to this challenge as it can assist endoscopists in detecting and classifying overlooked polyps and abnormalities in real time, improving the accuracy of diagnosis and enhancing treatment. In addition to the algorithm’s accuracy, transparency and interpretability are crucial to explaining the whys and hows of the algorithm’s prediction. Further, conclusions based on incorrect decisions may be fatal, especially in medicine. Despite these pitfalls, most algorithms are developed in private data, closed source, or proprietary software, and methods lack reproducibility. Therefore, to promote the development of efficient and transparent methods, we have organized the “Medico automatic polyp segmentation (Medico 2020)” and “MedAI: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation (MedAI 2021)” competitions. The Medico 2020 challenge received submissions from 17 teams, while the MedAI 2021 challenge also gathered submissions from another 17 distinct teams in the following year. We present a comprehensive summary and analyze each contribution, highlight the strength of the best-performing methods, and discuss the possibility of clinical translations of such methods into the clinic. Our analysis revealed that the participants improved dice coefficient metrics from 0.8607 in 2020 to 0.8993 in 2021 despite adding diverse and challenging frames (containing irregular, smaller, sessile, or flat polyps), which are frequently missed during a routine clinical examination. For the instrument segmentation task, the best team obtained a mean Intersection over union metric of 0.9364. For the transparency task, a multi-disciplinary team, including expert gastroenterologists, accessed each submission and evaluated the team based on open-source practices, failure case analysis, ablation studies, usability and understandability of evaluations to gain a deeper understanding of the models’ credibility for clinical deployment. The best team obtained a final transparency score of 21 out of 25. Through the comprehensive analysis of the challenge, we not only highlight the advancements in polyp and surgical instrument segmentation but also encourage subjective evaluation for building more transparent and understandable AI-based colonoscopy systems. Moreover, we discuss the need for multi-center and out-of-distribution testing to address the current limitations of the methods to reduce the cancer burden and improve patient care. • We present a detailed analysis of the Medico 2020 and MedAI 2021 challenges that are aimed at advancing automated polyp and instrument segmentation in colonoscopy for early colorectal cancer diagnosis by using novel deep learning methods. • To the best of our knowledge, MedAI 2021 is the first challenge to evaluate the transparency in both GI endoscopy and colonoscopy. Through the challenge, we invited the participants to list package dependencies and architecture code (with instructions for building, compiling, and training) and share trained model weights in a standardized format. Additionally, we invited participants to include the code for model evaluation and provide repository licensing information to enable others to use the code and the trained model responsibly. Moreover, we asked the participants to explain model predictions using intermediate heatmaps, perform ablation studies, conduct a thorough failure analysis, and share their code for reproducing the results. Finally, we performed a subjective evaluation by including an expert gastroenterologist in the group and gave the final transparency score based on the usefulness and understandability of the results. Our initiative aims to promote transparency in AI research and foster the development of reliable, interpretable, and trustworthy algorithms for use in medical image segmentation. • We provide a comparative analysis of the 34 proposed methods in both challenges (3 subtasks), covering small details of each team in the form of Tables, qualitative and quantitative results (failure analysis), and an in-depth analysis of the findings. • We explore trust, safety, interpretability, transparency, and generalizability issues and provide future strategies to overcome the current limitations of developed algorithms.

The timing of cell divisions in early embryos during the In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) process is a key predictor of embryo viability. However, observing cell divisions in Time-Lapse Monitoring (TLM) is a time-consuming process and highly depends on experts. In this paper, we propose EmbryosFormer, a computational model to automatically detect and classify cell divisions from original time-lapse images. Our proposed network is designed as an encoder-decoder deformable transformer with collaborative heads. The transformer contracting path predicts per-image labels and is optimized by a classification head. The transformer expanding path models the temporal coherency between embryo images to ensure monotonic non-decreasing constraint and is optimized by a segmentation head. Both contracting and expanding paths are synergetically learned by a collaboration head. We have benchmarked our proposed EmbryosFormer on two datasets: a public dataset with mouse embryos with 8-cell stage and an in-house dataset with human embryos with 4-cell stage. Source code: https://github.com/UARK-AICV/Embryos.