Darya Taratynova

Alya Almsouti, Ainur Khamitova, Darya Taratynova et al.

Assessing the severity of artifacts in pediatric brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is critical for diagnostic accuracy, especially in low-field systems where the signal-to-noise ratio is reduced. Manual quality assessment is time-consuming and subjective, motivating the need for robust automated solutions. In this work, we propose BRIQA (Balanced Reweighting in Image Quality Assessment), which addresses class imbalance in artifact severity levels. BRIQA uses gradient-based loss reweighting to dynamically adjust per-class contributions and employs a rotating batching scheme to ensure consistent exposure to underrepresented classes. Through experiments, no single architecture performs best across all artifact types, emphasizing the importance of architectural diversity. The rotating batching configuration improves performance across metrics by promoting balanced learning when combined with cross-entropy loss. BRIQA improves average macro F1 score from 0.659 to 0.706, with notable gains in Noise (0.430), Zipper (0.098), Positioning (0.097), Contrast (0.217), Motion (0.022), and Banding (0.012) artifact severity classification. The code is available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/BRIQA.

Shahad Hardan, Darya Taratynova, Abdelmajid Essofi et al.

Privacy preservation in AI is crucial, especially in healthcare, where models rely on sensitive patient data. In the emerging field of machine unlearning, existing methodologies struggle to remove patient data from trained multimodal architectures, which are widely used in healthcare. We propose Forget-MI, a novel machine unlearning method for multimodal medical data, by establishing loss functions and perturbation techniques. Our approach unlearns unimodal and joint representations of the data requested to be forgotten while preserving knowledge from the remaining data and maintaining comparable performance to the original model. We evaluate our results using performance on the forget dataset, performance on the test dataset, and Membership Inference Attack (MIA), which measures the attacker's ability to distinguish the forget dataset from the training dataset. Our model outperforms the existing approaches that aim to reduce MIA and the performance on the forget dataset while keeping an equivalent performance on the test set. Specifically, our approach reduces MIA by 0.202 and decreases AUC and F1 scores on the forget set by 0.221 and 0.305, respectively. Additionally, our performance on the test set matches that of the retrained model, while allowing forgetting. Code is available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/Forget-MI.git

Darya Taratynova, Ahmed Aly, Numan Saeed et al.

Foundation models (FMs) are reshaping medical imaging, yet their application in echocardiography remains limited. While several echocardiography-specific FMs have recently been introduced, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate them. Echocardiography poses unique challenges, including noisy acquisitions, high frame redundancy, and limited public datasets. Most existing solutions evaluate on private data, restricting comparability. To address this, we introduce CardioBench, a comprehensive benchmark for echocardiography FMs. CardioBench unifies eight publicly available datasets into a standardized suite spanning four regression and five classification tasks, covering functional, structural, diagnostic, and view recognition endpoints. We evaluate several leading FM, including cardiac-specific, biomedical, and general-purpose encoders, under consistent zero-shot, probing, and alignment protocols. Our results highlight complementary strengths across model families: temporal modeling is critical for functional regression, retrieval provides robustness under distribution shift, and domain-specific text encoders capture physiologically meaningful axes. General-purpose encoders transfer strongly and often close the gap with probing, but struggle with fine-grained distinctions like view classification and subtle pathology recognition. By releasing preprocessing, splits, and public evaluation pipelines, CardioBench establishes a reproducible reference point and offers actionable insights to guide the design of future echocardiography foundation models.

Numan Saeed, Salma Hassan, Shahad Hardan et al.

We present a publicly available multimodal dataset for head and neck cancer research, comprising 1123 annotated Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) studies from patients with histologically confirmed disease, acquired from 10 international medical centers. All studies contain co-registered PET/CT scans with varying acquisition protocols, reflecting real-world clinical diversity from a long-term, multi-institution retrospective collection. Primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and involved lymph nodes (GTVn) were manually segmented by experienced radiation oncologists and radiologists following established guidelines. We provide anonymized NifTi files, expert-annotated segmentation masks, comprehensive clinical metadata, and radiotherapy dose distributions for a patient subset. The metadata include TNM staging, HPV status, demographics, long-term follow-up outcomes, survival times, censoring indicators, and treatment information. To demonstrate its utility, we benchmark three key clinical tasks: automated tumor segmentation, recurrence-free survival prediction, and HPV status classification, using state-of-the-art deep learning models like UNet, SegResNet, and multimodal prognostic frameworks.

Darya Taratynova, Alya Almsouti, Beknur Kalmakhanbet et al.

Congenital heart defect (CHD) detection in ultrasound videos is hindered by image noise and probe positioning variability. While automated methods can reduce operator dependence, current machine learning approaches often neglect temporal information, limit themselves to binary classification, and do not account for prediction calibration. We propose Temporal Prompt Alignment (TPA), a method leveraging foundation image-text model and prompt-aware contrastive learning to classify fetal CHD on cardiac ultrasound videos. TPA extracts features from each frame of video subclips using an image encoder, aggregates them with a trainable temporal extractor to capture heart motion, and aligns the video representation with class-specific text prompts via a margin-hinge contrastive loss. To enhance calibration for clinical reliability, we introduce a Conditional Variational Autoencoder Style Modulation (CVAESM) module, which learns a latent style vector to modulate embeddings and quantifies classification uncertainty. Evaluated on a private dataset for CHD detection and on a large public dataset, EchoNet-Dynamic, for systolic dysfunction, TPA achieves state-of-the-art macro F1 scores of 85.40% for CHD diagnosis, while also reducing expected calibration error by 5.38% and adaptive ECE by 6.8%. On EchoNet-Dynamic's three-class task, it boosts macro F1 by 4.73% (from 53.89% to 58.62%). Temporal Prompt Alignment (TPA) is a framework for fetal congenital heart defect (CHD) classification in ultrasound videos that integrates temporal modeling, prompt-aware contrastive learning, and uncertainty quantification.