Numan Saeed

Hussain Alasmawi, Numan Saeed, Mohammad Yaqub

The growing demand for prenatal ultrasound imaging has intensified a global shortage of trained sonographers, creating barriers to essential fetal health monitoring. Deep learning has the potential to enhance sonographers' efficiency and support the training of new practitioners. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are particularly promising for ultrasound interpretation, as they can jointly process images and text to perform multiple clinical tasks within a single framework. However, despite the expansion of VLMs, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate their performance in fetal ultrasound imaging. This gap is primarily due to the modality's challenging nature, operator dependency, and the limited public availability of datasets. To address this gap, we present Fetal-Gauge, the first and largest visual question answering benchmark specifically designed to evaluate VLMs across various fetal ultrasound tasks. Our benchmark comprises over 42,000 images and 93,000 question-answer pairs, spanning anatomical plane identification, visual grounding of anatomical structures, fetal orientation assessment, clinical view conformity, and clinical diagnosis. We systematically evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs, including general-purpose and medical-specific models, and reveal a substantial performance gap: the best-performing model achieves only 55\% accuracy, far below clinical requirements. Our analysis identifies critical limitations of current VLMs in fetal ultrasound interpretation, highlighting the urgent need for domain-adapted architectures and specialized training approaches. Fetal-Gauge establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing multimodal deep learning in prenatal care and provides a pathway toward addressing global healthcare accessibility challenges. Our benchmark will be publicly available once the paper gets accepted.

Anees Ur Rehman Hashmi, Numan Saeed, Christoph Lippert

Multimodal medical large language models have shown substantial progress in chest X-ray interpretation but continue to face challenges in spatial reasoning and anatomical understanding. Although existing grounding techniques improve overall performance, they often fail to establish a true anatomical correspondence, resulting in incorrect anatomical understanding in the medical domain. To address this gap, we introduce AnatomiX, a multitask multimodal large language model for anatomically grounded chest X-ray interpretation. Inspired by the radiological workflow, AnatomiX adopts a two stage approach: first, it identifies anatomical structures and extracts their features, and then leverages a large language model to perform diverse downstream tasks such as phrase grounding, report generation, visual question answering, and image understanding. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that AnatomiX achieves superior anatomical reasoning and delivers over 25% improvement in performance on anatomy grounding, phrase grounding, grounded diagnosis and grounded captioning tasks compared to existing approaches. Code and pretrained model are available at github.com/aneesurhashmi/anatomix.