Medical Image Localization

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Overview

Medical image localization studies how to identify where anatomical landmarks, lesions, organs, and devices appear in 2D and 3D scans or clinical videos, supporting diagnosis, measurement, and image-guided procedures. Common approaches include heatmap and coordinate regression, object detection and segmentation, anatomical priors, weakly or self-supervised learning, temporal tracking, registration, and vision-language grounding. Methods are evaluated across X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound, pathology, and endoscopy using landmark error, detection and overlap scores, and tests on external sites; some also guide robotic scanning or surgery. A central challenge is that strong average results can mask failures on small or rare targets, across modalities or hospitals, and under strict 3D alignment, while reliable uncertainty and clinical integration remain open problems.

Latest papers

CardsList

104 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 10% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. UltraStar: Semantic-Aware Star Graph Modeling for Echocardiography Navigation

    Mar 2, 2026Teng Wang, Haojun Jiang, Chenxi Li +6EchocardiographyUltrasound Imaging

    Department of Automation, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China +1

  2. GazeXPErT: An Expert Eye-tracking Dataset for Interpretable and Explainable AI in Oncologic FDG-PET/CT Scans

    Feb 26, 2026Joy T Wu, Daniel Beckmann, Sarah Miller +15Explainable Medical Image AnalysisMedical Image Benchmarks

    Stanford University/Stanford Health Care, Radiology Department, Stanford, CA 94305, USA · University of Münster, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Systems, Heisenbergstraße 2, Münster 48149, Germany · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences, Champaign, IL 61820, USA +1

  3. Following the Diagnostic Trace: Visual Cognition-guided Cooperative Network for Chest X-Ray Diagnosis

    Feb 25, 2026Shaoxuan Wu, Jingkun Chen, Chong Ma +3Medical Image AnalysisChest X-Ray Classification

    College of Computer Science, Northwest University, Xi’an, China, 710127 · Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX3 7DQ, United Kingdom · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China +1

  4. Detector-in-the-Loop Tracking: Active Memory Rectification for Stable Glottic Opening Localization

    Feb 22, 2026Huayu Wang, Bahaa Alattar, Cheng-Yen Yang +5Visual Object TrackingMedical Image Localization

    University of Washington, Seattle, WA · Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, Republic of Korea · Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, WA +1

  5. Artefact-Aware Fungal Detection in Dermatophytosis: A Real-Time Transformer-Based Approach for KOH Microscopy

    Feb 22, 2026Rana Gursoy, Abdurrahim Yilmaz, Baris Kizilyaprak +5Microscopy Image AnalysisMedical Image Localization

    Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Yildiz Technical University · Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Imperial College London · Department of Dermatology and Venereology, Istanbul Research and Training Hospital +2

  6. Towards Autonomous Robotic Kidney Ultrasound: Spatial-Efficient Volumetric Imaging via Template Guided Optimal Pivoting

    Feb 18, 2026Xihan Ma, Haichong ZhangRobotic UltrasoundUltrasound Imaging

  7. MB-DSMIL-CL-PL: Scalable Weakly Supervised Ovarian Cancer Subtype Classification and Localisation Using Contrastive and Prototype Learning with Frozen Patch Features

    Feb 16, 2026Marcus Jenkins, Jasenka Mazibrada, Bogdan Leahu +1Histopathology Image ClassificationCancer Subtype Classification

    School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK · Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7UY, UK

  8. CT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Lesion Understanding in Computed Tomography

    Feb 16, 2026Qingqing Zhu, Qiao Jin, Tejas S. Mathai +10Medical Image BenchmarksComputed Tomography

  9. CLARiTy: A Vision Transformer for Multi-Label Classification and Weakly-Supervised Localization of Chest X-ray Pathologies

    Dec 18, 2025John M. Statheros, Hairong Wang, Richard KleinChest X-Ray ClassificationMedical Image Localization

    School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

  10. RAU: Reference-based Anatomical Understanding with Vision Language Models

    Sep 26, 2025Yiwei Li, Yikang Liu, Jiaqi Guo +7Image SegmentationMedical VLMs

    United Imaging Intelligence, Boston, MA, USA · School of Computing, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

  11. Echo-E3^3Net: Efficient Endocardial Spatio-Temporal Network for Ejection Fraction Estimation

    Mar 21, 2025Moein Heidari, Afshin Bozorgpour, AmirHossein Zarif-Fakharnia +5Efficient Neural Network InferenceLeft Ventricular Ejection Fraction Estimation

    University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada · University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany · Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran +1

  12. Optimising for the Unknown: Domain Alignment for Cephalometric Landmark Detection

    Oct 6, 2024Julian Wyatt, Irina VoiculescuAnatomical Landmark DetectionMedical Image Localization

    Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

  13. Precise localization within the GI tract by combining classification of CNNs and time-series analysis of HMMs

    Oct 11, 2023Julia Werner, Christoph Gerum, Moritz Reiber +2EndoscopyMedical Imaging

    Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Germany. · Department of Mathematics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

  14. Structure-Guided Self-Supervised Matching for One-Shot Medical Landmark Detection

    Mar 3, 2022Qingsong Yao, Zhen Huang, Ao Wang +4Few-Shot LearningImage Matching

    Soochow School of Artificial Intelligence Renmin University of China · Department of Computer Science University of Science and Technology of China · School of Biomedical Engineering University of Science and Technology of China +3