Development and evaluation of CADe systems in low-prevalence setting: The RARE25 challenge for early detection of Barrett's neoplasia
Organizations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Architectures for Reliable Image Analysis Lab, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands · Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Computer-aided detection (CADe) of early neoplasia in Barrett's esophagus is a low-prevalence surveillance problem in which clinically relevant findings are rare. Although many CADe systems report strong performance on balanced or enriched datasets, their behavior under realistic prevalence remains insufficiently characterized. The RARE25 challenge addresses this gap by introducing a large-scale, prevalence-aware benchmark for neoplasia detection. It includes a public training set and a hidden test set reflecting real-world incidence. Methods were evaluated using operating-point-specific metrics emphasizing high sensitivity and accounting for prevalence. Eleven teams from seven countries submitted approaches using diverse architectures, pretraining, ensembling, and calibration strategies. While several methods achieved strong discriminative performance, positive predictive values remained low, highlighting the difficulty of low-prevalence detection and the risk of overestimating clinical utility when prevalence is ignored. All methods relied on fully supervised classification despite the dominance of normal findings, indicating a lack of prevalence-agnostic approaches such as anomaly detection or one-class learning. By releasing a public dataset and a reproducible evaluation framework, RARE25 aims to support the development of CADe systems robust to prevalence shift and suitable for clinical surveillance workflows.
Figures & tables
| Team | Affiliation | Architecture | Ens. | Add. data | Pretrain | IV | Calib. |
| IMSY | German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Division of Intelligent Medical Systems, Germany | ResNet-50 ViT-L (DINOv3) | 40-model ensemble | No | GastroNet-5M DINOv3 (LoRA) | 5-fold | Yes |
| UT | The University of Tokyo, Japan | MaxViT-T | No | No | ImageNet | 5-fold | No |
| Jmees-inc | Jmees-inc, Japan | ViT-B + ViT-L (seg.) | 2-model ensemble | Yes | Segmentation pretraining | 5-fold | No |
| MEDAI | Konkuk Univ.; Pukyong Natl. Univ.; Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, South Korea | ResNet-50 | No | External val set | GastroNet-5M | External data [ 40 ] | Yes |
| AJLG_ETRI | Ajou University; ETRI, South Korea | ConvNeXt-B | No | No | ImageNet | 5-fold | No |
| sk | Muroran Institute of Technology; Fujita Health University, Japan | ConvNeXt-B | 10-model ensemble | No | ImageNet-21k | 50/50 | No |
Medical Image Analysis
Medical image analysis uses computational methods to interpret clinical images, measure anatomy and disease, and support diagnosis and treatment.
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