Medical Image Anomaly Detection

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Overview

Medical image anomaly detection identifies findings that differ from expected anatomy, supporting screening, quality assurance, and discovery of rare or previously unseen disease. Common approaches learn normal patterns from healthy scans using reconstruction, feature-distance, density, or prototype models, then flag and localize deviations; other methods use synthetic lesions or small labeled examples. Foundation models and vision-language systems increasingly enable zero-shot or few-shot detection across modalities, sometimes adding anatomical context or visual explanations. A central challenge is distinguishing subtle pathology from normal variation while generalizing across scanners, institutions, and modalities, so external evaluation and reliable lesion localization remain important.

Latest papers

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87 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Learning Pathology-Sensitive Representations for Unsupervised Retinal OCT Anomaly Detection

    Oct 23, 2026Tania Haghighi, Sina Gholami, Behafarin Emam +5Medical Image Anomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection

    University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA · University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA · Byers Eye Institute at Stanford, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA +1

  2. OpenMAP-HIE: Pathology Informed Score-based Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy Lesion Segmentation

    Oct 21, 2026Pengyu Kan, Craig Jones, Kenichi OishiMedical Image SegmentationMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Johns Hopkins University · Johns Hopkins University, University of Alberta · Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  3. NoduleFlow: Automatic 3D Lung Nodule Detection and Segmentation

    Oct 12, 2026Giulia Romoli, Filippo Ruffini, Francesco Di Feola +3Lung Nodule DetectionMedical Image Segmentation

    Department of Diagnostics and Intervention, Radiation Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Umeå University, Universitetstorget 4, Umeå, Sweden. · Unit of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Systems, Department of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo 21, Rome, Italy. · Department of Naval, Electrical, Electronic, and Telecommunications Engineering, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11A, Genoa, Italy.

  4. A4-MR: Abnormality-aware Anatomical Alignment for MR

    Oct 9, 2026Noel D'souza, Zhijian Yang, Nishank Singla +14Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsRadiology VLMs

    GE Healthcare, Seattle, USA · GE Healthcare, Budapest, Hungary · Amazon, USA

  5. A Multi-Source Ultrasound Benchmark Revealing the Limits of Contemporary Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection Methods

    Oct 7, 2026Marco Riedenauer, Daniel Kienzle, Pratik Mayekar +1Medical Image Anomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection

    University of Augsburg

  6. Quasi-Binarized Autoencoders: An Architecture-Independent Information Bottleneck for Medical Image Anomaly Detection

    Oct 7, 2026Shouhei Hanaoka, Takahiro Nakao, Atsushi Takamatsu +2Medical Image Anomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection

    Department of Radiology, The University of Tokyo Hospital, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8655, Japan · Department of Computational Diagnostic Radiology and Preventive Medicine, The University of Tokyo Hospital, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8655, Japan · Department of Radiology, Kanazawa University Hospital, 13-1 Takara-machi, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, 920-8641, Japan

  7. The RSNA Intracranial Aneurysm (RSNA-ICA) Dataset

    Oct 1, 2026Maria Correia de Verdier, Rachit Saluja, Jason Sho +37Medical Image Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Localization

    Department of Surgical Sciences, Section of Neuroradiology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University and Cornell Tech, New York, NY, USA · Department of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA +37

  8. Multi-Site Real-World Performance of Commercial AI for Pulmonary and Incidental Pulmonary Embolism Detection

    Sep 29, 2026Aawez Mansuri, Mohammadreza Chavoshi, Theodorus Dapamede +13Medical Image AnalysisMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA · Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale University New Haven, CT, USA · Department of Biomedical Informatics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

  9. FD-AA: A Lightweight Focal-Diffuse And Attenuation-Aware Head for Incidental Abdominal Abnormality Detection in Chest CT

    Sep 28, 2026Haoyan Ding, Kritika Iyer, Halid Yerebakan +9Medical Image Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Classification

    Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Malvern, PA, USA · University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

  10. VD-DeepStack: Bridging Visual Comparison and Language Reasoning for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

    Sep 28, 2026Mengyang Zhao, Zhuolin He, Haiyang Yu +9Few-Shot Anomaly DetectionVisual Reasoning

    Fudan University · University of Southern California · Fuzhou University +1

  11. Unsupervised Brain Anomaly Detection as a Bayesian Inverse Problem with Diffusion Prior

    Sep 21, 2026Hugues Roy, Reuben Dorent, Ninon BurgosMedical Image Anomaly DetectionAnomaly Localization

    Sorbonne Université, Institut du Cerveau - Paris Brain Institute - ICM, CNRS, Inria, Inserm, AP-HP, Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière, F-75013, Paris, France

  12. Seeing Abnormal from Normal: Glomerular Abnormality in Representations of Normal Renal Morphology

    Sep 16, 2026Greta Hasko, Rachit Saluja, Tianyu Shi +11Medical Image Anomaly DetectionUnsupervised Anomaly Detection

    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA · Cornell Tech, New York, NY 10044, USA · Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, CN +6

  13. Bridging Vision Foundation Model Priors with CLIP for Spatial-aware Few-shot Anomaly Detection in Medical Images

    Sep 11, 2026Juzheng Miao, Yuchen Yuan, Cheng Chen +1Few-Shot Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +1

  14. GRIPNet: Gaussian Radial Intensity Prior Guided Architecture for Pulmonary Nodule Detection in CT

    Sep 10, 2026Haojie Yang, Ran SuSmall Object DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

  15. Generalized Biomedicine Discovery

    Sep 9, 2026Luyao Tang, Yingkai Yang, Hanqi Chen +3Generalized Category DiscoveryMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

  16. Example-based Robust Abnormality Detection with Minimal Annotations using Exemplar Med-DETR

    Aug 25, 2026Sheethal Bhat, Bogdan Georgescu, Awais Mansoor +5Object DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

  17. Image-Conditioned Diffusion Models for Quality Assurance of Organ-at-Risk Segmentations in Radiotherapy

    Aug 24, 2026Clea Dronne, Catharine H Clark, Xavier Loizeau +3Medical Image Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Segmentation

    UCL Hawkes Institute, Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom · National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK · Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom +3

  18. Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Image Dataset Quality Assurance in Multi-Center Breast MRI

    Aug 17, 2026Chiara Tappermann, Steffen Renisch, Lars Ole Schwen +3Medical ImagingMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Max-Von-Laue-Straße 2, Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany · University of Bremen, Bibliothekstraße 1, Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany · Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Hannover Medical School, Carl-Neuberg-Str. 1, Hannover, 28359, Lower Saxony, Germany

  19. HexMIL: Hierarchical Attention MIL for Ante-Hoc Explainable Detection of AI-Manipulated CT Volumes

    Aug 5, 2026Orazio Pontorno, Luca Guarnera, Zahid Akhtar +1Explainable Deepfake DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Catania, Italy · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, Utica, NY, USA

  20. Keep the Needle, Prune the Haystack: Defect-Preserving Token Pruning for Efficient Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

    Aug 4, 2026Yanning Hou, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiaoyun Wang +3Medical Image Anomaly DetectionIndustrial Anomaly Detection

    2National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China · 1Anhui University, Hefei, China

  21. A Unified 2D Framework for DeepLesion Detection, Segmentation and Short Report Generation

    Aug 3, 2026Ruida Cheng, Tejas S. Mathai, Benjamin Hou +4Radiology Report GenerationMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    a Scientific Application Services, Center of Information Technology, NIH · b National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, NIH · c Imaging Biomarkers and Computer-Aided Diagnosis Laboratory, Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Clinical Center, NIH

  22. FreqAnchorAD: Language-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Frequency-Deviation Anchoring

    Aug 1, 2026Jianfeng Qiu, Peiyuan Li, Juan Xie +4Frequency-Domain Feature LearningMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Anhui University, Hefei, China · National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

  23. Reconstruction-Shift Discrimination via Mask-Guided Latent Diffusion for Medical Anomaly Detection

    Aug 1, 2026Yibo Wan, Jinyu Cai, Yunhe Zhang +2Latent Diffusion ModelsMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Department of Computer and Information Science, SKL-IOTSC, University of Macau, China +1

  24. Beyond Static Anchors: Bounded Prototype Conditioning for Language-Free Medical Anomaly Detection

    Aug 1, 2026Yibo Wan, Jinyu Cai, See-kiong NgFew-Shot Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  25. VFAD: Variational Semantic Prompting Meets Frequency-Adaptive Representation Learning for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

    Jul 31, 2026Peng Chen, Kaige Li, Wei Wang +5VLM AdaptationFrequency-Domain Feature Learning

    School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China

  26. Group Equivariant Diffusion for Anomaly Detection in Computational Cytology

    Jul 28, 2026Swarnadip Chatterjee, Ssharvien Kumar Sivakumar, Anirban MukhopadhyayComputational PathologyMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden · Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

  27. Panda: Unsupervised Pelvic Anomaly Detection for Real-Time MR Imaging

    Jul 27, 2026Anika Knupfer, Maximilian Lindholz, Johanna Paula Müller +4Online Anomaly DetectionMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Institute of Information Processing, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany · CAIMED, L3S, Hannover, Germany · Department of Radiology, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany +2

  28. Bowel Obstruction Detection and Localization on Abdominal CT with Deep Learning

    Jul 24, 2026Moritz Vandenhirtz, Andrea Agostini, Dana Belde +5Medical Image Anomaly DetectionExplainable Medical Image Analysis

    Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Department of Radiology, Kantonsspital Baden, affiliated Hospital for Research and Teaching of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich, Baden, Switzerland · Department of Forensic Medicine Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  29. PRISM-DR: Per-lesion Retinal Inference with Specialist Models for Diabetic Retinopathy

    Jul 22, 2026Zübeyr Özeren, Tansel UyarMedical Image Object DetectionDiabetic Retinopathy Grading

    Department of Biomedical Engineering, Baskent University, Ankara, Türkiye · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Ankara University, Ankara, Türkiye

  30. A novel unsupervised machine learning strategy to handle multimodal cardiac PET/MRI data

    Jul 15, 2026Brunnhilde Ponsi, Thomas Carlier, Lara Marteau +5Medical ImagingMedical Image Anomaly Detection

    Nantes Université, CHU Nantes, Nantes, France · CRCI2NA, INSERM UMR 1307, Nantes, France · Nantes Université, CHU Nantes, F-44000 Nantes, France +5