Papers for

medical device engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

UBone3D improves 3D bone shape from noisy ultrasound data

UBone3D: Physics-Rectified Conditional Flow Matching for Anatomical 3D Shape Completion from Ultrasound

Abstract: Three-dimensional ultrasound (US) is a safe, radiation-free complementary modality to CT and X-rays for longitudinal monitoring, yet its segmentation-derived partial point clouds are extremely artifact-laden. Consequently, it is challenging to recover a clean and complete anatomical structure from such US point clouds. In this paper, we present UBone3D, a novel framework based on physics-rectified conditional flow matching (CFM) that performs point cloud completion directly from partial US observations. UBone3D models deterministic physics artifacts (e.g., surface thickening, streaking, dropouts) via a simulated physics proxy, and introduces test-time physics rectification to steer the shape completion. At inference, the completion is jointly steered by two decoupled forces: (1) anatomical plausibility enforced by a CT-trained generative shape prior, BoneFM, and (2) physics consistency enforced by USimNet in the ultrasound formation space. Extensive experiments on simulated and in-vivo data demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy and anatomical fidelity over existing baselines.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Ultrasound scans can create partial, unclear 3D pictures of bones because of artifacts like blurring and missing parts. The authors designed UBone3D, a computer method that fills in missing bone shapes by learning from clearer CT scans and simulating how ultrasound imaging causes artifacts. This approach helps produce more accurate and realistic 3D bone models from ultrasound data alone. It was tested on both simulated and real patient data and showed better results than previous methods.
Open 2609.11506v1

Real-time corneal nerve image stitching enhances wider view during exams

CRISP: Corneal Confocal Microscopy Real-Time Image Stitching Pipeline

Abstract: Morphology of the sub-basal nerve plexus (SNP) reflects peripheral nerve health, and corneal confocal microscopy (CCM) provides an important means for in vivo, real-time, non-invasive observation of the SNP. However, mainstream CCM devices offer a limited field of view per frame, whereas the SNP is spatially non-uniform; discrete image sampling is therefore sensitive to sampling location and frame selection, which limits the reproducibility and clinical adoption of CCM as a quantitative assessment tool. Wide-field stitching can reconstruct larger SNP mosaics by integrating sequentially acquired CCM images, but existing methods largely rely on offline post-processing, additional hardware, or specific acquisition protocols, and lack open-source real-time solutions for conventional CCM video streams. This paper presents CRISP (Corneal confocal microscopy Real-time Image Stitching Pipeline), an open-source real-time SNP wide-field stitching framework for conventional CCM examination video streams. CRISP excludes defocused and discontinuous segments via focus-aware gating, propagates poses through local pairwise registration, and maintains non-redundant spatial coverage with a sparse anchor map; when local temporal continuity is interrupted, the system completes relocalization and subgraph merging through global appearance retrieval followed by geometric verification. The framework prioritizes low-latency coverage feedback during examination while outputting accepted frames, poses, and anchor information to initialize offline fine stitching. To our knowledge, CRISP is the first open-source real-time SNP wide-field stitching framework released for conventional CCM video streams. By lowering the barrier to adoption and reproduction of wide-field stitching, CRISP may help move SNP wide-field imaging from a research tool into routine clinical examination workflows.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Seeing the tiny nerves in the eye's cornea helps doctors understand nerve health. But existing cameras only capture small parts at a time, so it’s hard to get a full picture. The authors created CRISP, a new open-source tool that stitches these small images together in real-time during exams. This gives a bigger, clearer view without special equipment or complex steps. CRISP could make wide-area corneal nerve imaging easier to use in everyday medical check-ups.
Open 2609.07336v1

HealthLoopQA benchmarks AI reasoning on diabetes wearable data

HealthLoopQA: A Context-Aware Question Answering Benchmark for Interpreting Wearable Monitoring Data in Diabetes Care

Abstract: As medical wearables become integrated into daily chronic disease care, effectively interpreting longitudinal monitoring data is essential for patients and clinicians to understand health trends, detect safety-critical events, and make informed decisions. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for transforming this streaming physiological data into personalized health insights, evaluating their reasoning capability and analytical rigor in diverse monitoring tasks remains a fundamental challenge. Existing medical wearable question answering (QA) benchmarks primarily assess short-horizon classification or statistical summaries, largely ignoring the long-term patterns, therapeutic and behavioural contexts, and potential system failures inherent in real-world deployments. To address this, we introduce HealthLoopQA, a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark for evaluating LLM reasoning over continuous diabetes monitoring data. Grounded in a novel taxonomy of eleven atomic reasoning abilities, HealthLoopQA comprises 127 tasks and over 1,500 QA instances spanning process mining, anomaly detection, and prediction over 30-day horizons. To systematically evaluate safety awareness, we complement real-world datasets with a fault-injected simulation testbed modeling diverse device malfunctions and cyber-physical attacks to generate physiologically plausible hazard scenarios. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs across prompting and agentic frameworks reveals severe limitations in complex temporal pattern mining. Furthermore, we identify a broader phenomenon of In-context Laziness under long-context prompting, highlighting critical open challenges in deploying LLMs for rigorous long-horizon medical reasoning.

Mon 7 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Medical wearables collect lots of health data over time, but understanding this long-term information is hard for patients and doctors. The authors created HealthLoopQA, a test that checks how well AI language models can analyze 30 days of diabetes monitoring data. This test includes tasks like spotting unusual events and predicting future patterns, even when devices misbehave or are hacked. The authors found current AI models struggle with complex long-term patterns and tend to stop trying hard when given lots of information.
Open 2609.06976v1