OVERVIEW OF THE CXR-LT 2026 CHALLENGE: MULTI-CENTER LONG-TAILED AND ZERO SHOT CHEST X-RAY CLASSIFICATION.

TitleOVERVIEW OF THE CXR-LT 2026 CHALLENGE: MULTI-CENTER LONG-TAILED AND ZERO SHOT CHEST X-RAY CLASSIFICATION.
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2026
AuthorsDong H, Lin Y, Zhou P, Feng XZhong, Legasto AClint, Lin M, Chen H, Yang Y, Shih G, Peng Y
JournalProc IEEE Int Symp Biomed Imaging
Volume2026
Date Published2026 Apr
ISSN1945-7928
Abstract

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation is hindered by the long-tailed distribution of pathologies and the open-world nature of clinical environments. Existing benchmarks often rely on closed-set classes from single institutions, failing to capture the prevalence of rare diseases or the appearance of novel findings. To address this, we present the CXR-LT 2026 challenge. This third iteration of the benchmark introduces a multi-center dataset comprising over 145,000 images from PadChest and NIH Chest X-ray datasets. The challenge defines two core tasks: (1) Robust Multi-Label Classification on 30 known classes and (2) Open-World Generalization to 6 unseen (outof-distribution) rare disease classes. We report the results of the top-performing teams, evaluating them via mean Average Precision (mAP), AUROC, and F1-score. The winning solutions achieved an mAP of 0.5854 on Task 1 and 0.4315 on Task 2, demonstrating that large-scale vision-language pre-training significantly mitigates the performance drop typically associated with zero-shot diagnosis.

DOI10.1109/isbi61048.2026.11515307
Alternate JournalProc IEEE Int Symp Biomed Imaging
PubMed ID42222662
PubMed Central IDPMC13220745
Grant ListR01 CA289249 / CA / NCI NIH HHS / United States