ISBI 2026: Accepted Paper & 1st Place Winner

We are excited to share that our technical paper “Handling Supervision Scarcity in Chest X-ray Classification: Long-Tailed and Zero-Shot Learning” by Ha Hieu Pham et al. has been accepted for oral presentation at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2026 (ISBI 2026), one of the leading international conferences at the intersection of medical imaging, computer vision, and machine learning. The work presents our solution to the CXR-LT 2026 Challenge, which focuses on developing robust AI methods for chest X-ray disease recognition under long-tailed data distributions and zero-shot / out-of-distribution scenarios, reflecting real-world clinical conditions where many diseases are rare or previously unseen.

Image: The 2026 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging meeting will be fully in-person conference in London, UK. The conference will include tutorials, workshops, plenary talks, invited special sessions, challenges, as well as oral and poster presentations of peer-reviewed papers.

The joint team from the Computer Vision and Medical AI Lab (CVMAIL), VinUni- Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC), and the Machine and Hybrid Intelligence Lab (MIHL) led by Ulas Bagci at Northwestern University achieved First Place among 72 participating teams, ranking #1 in both tracks: 🥇 Task 1 – Long-tailed Multi-label Classification and 🥇 Task 2 – Zero-shot / Out-of Distribution Multi-label Classification.

Image: Congratulations to all members involved in this work: Ha Hieu Pham, Nguyen Hai Dang, Nguyen Thanh Huy, Assoc. Prof. Min Xu (CMU), Assoc. Prof. Ulas Bagci (NU), Dr. Le Trung Nghia (HCMUS) and Asst. Prof. Pham Huy Hieu. Special congratulations to Ha Hieu Pham, Research Assistant, and Nguyen Hai Dang, PhD student of the lab, who represented CVMAIL in the challenge and contributed significantly to this outstanding achievement. 

We sincerely thank Prof. Hieu Pham, Prof. Min Xu, Prof. Ulas Bagci, and Dr. Trung Nghia Le for their invaluable guidance and support, as well as MSc. Thanh Huy Nguyen for mentorship and continuous research guidance. The team looks forward to presenting this work at ISBI 2026 in London, UK.

For more information: 

Our technical paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.13430

Original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.22092

Challenge website: https://lnkd.in/gwaxSAHt

Technical paper: https://lnkd.in/gc7cX-Vr