A Comparative Study in Surgical AI: Datasets, Foundation Models, and Barriers to Med-AGI

Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have matched or exceeded human experts in several benchmarks of biomedical task performance, but have lagged behind on surgical image-analysis benchmarks. Since surgery requires integrating disparate tasks -- including multimodal data integration, human interaction, and physical effects -- generally-capable AI models could be particularly attractive as a collaborative tool if performance could be improved. On the one hand, the canonical approach of scaling architecture size and training data is attractive, especially since there are millions of hours of surgical video data generated per year. On the other hand, preparing surgical data for AI training requires significantly higher levels of professional expertise, and training on that data requires expensive computational resources. These trade-offs paint an uncertain picture of whether and to-what-extent modern AI could aid surgical practice. In this paper, we explore this question through a case study of surgical tool detection using state-of-the-art AI methods available in 2026. We demonstrate that even with multi-billion parameter models and extensive training, current Vision Language Models fall short in the seemingly simple task of tool detection in neurosurgery. Additionally, we show scaling experiments indicating that increasing model size and training time only leads to diminishing improvements in relevant performance metrics. Thus, our experiments suggest that current models could still face significant obstacles in surgical use cases. Moreover, some obstacles cannot be simply ``scaled away'' with additional compute and persist across diverse model architectures, raising the question of whether data and label availability are the only limiting factors. We discuss the main contributors to these constraints and advance potential solutions.

A novel method to enhance pneumonia detection via a model-level ensembling of CNN and vision transformer

Pneumonia remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is a fundamental diagnostic tool, but traditional analysis relies on time-intensive expert evaluation. Recently, deep learning has shown immense potential for automating pneumonia detection from CXRs. This paper explores applying neural networks to improve CXR-based pneumonia diagnosis. We developed a novel model fusing Convolution Neural networks (CNN) and Vision Transformer networks via model-level ensembling. Our fusion architecture combines a ResNet34 variant and a Multi-Axis Vision Transformer small model. Both base models are initialized with ImageNet pre-trained weights. The output layers are removed, and features are combined using a flattening layer before final classification. Experiments used the Kaggle pediatric pneumonia dataset containing 1,341 normal and 3,875 pneumonia CXR images. We compared our model against standalone ResNet34, Vision Transformer, and Swin Transformer Tiny baseline models using identical training procedures. Extensive data augmentation, Adam optimization, learning rate warmup, and decay were employed. The fusion model achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 94.87%, surpassing the baselines. We also attained excellent sensitivity, specificity, kappa score, and positive predictive value. Confusion matrix analysis confirms fewer misclassifications. The ResNet34 and Vision Transformer combination enables jointly learning robust features from CNNs and Transformer paradigms. This model-level ensemble technique effectively integrates their complementary strengths for enhanced pneumonia classification.

Study of Vision Transformers for Covid-19 Detection from Chest X-rays

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global health crisis, highlighting the need for rapid and accurate virus detection. This research paper examines transfer learning with vision transformers for COVID-19 detection, known for its excellent performance in image recognition tasks. We leverage the capability of Vision Transformers to capture global context and learn complex patterns from chest X-ray images. In this work, we explored the recent state-of-art transformer models to detect Covid-19 using CXR images such as vision transformer (ViT), Swin-transformer, Max vision transformer (MViT), and Pyramid Vision transformer (PVT). Through the utilization of transfer learning with IMAGENET weights, the models achieved an impressive accuracy range of 98.75% to 99.5%. Our experiments demonstrate that Vision Transformers achieve state-of-the-art performance in COVID-19 detection, outperforming traditional methods and even Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The results highlight the potential of Vision Transformers as a powerful tool for COVID-19 detection, with implications for improving the efficiency and accuracy of screening and diagnosis in clinical settings.