ArticleCommunications medicine2026
A computationally frugal, open-source chest CT foundation model for thoracic disease detection in lung cancer screening programmes.
Article in Communications medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multicohort Evaluation of Acquisition Confounding in Single-Site Lung-CT Malignancy Classification with Frozen Foundation-Model Features.Journal of imaging informatics in medicine · 2026Article
- Artificial intelligence in thoracic surgery: a narrative review of clinical advances and applications in 2025.Journal of thoracic disease · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
16 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundLow-dose computed tomography (LDCT) employed in lung cancer screening (LCS) programmes is increasing in uptake worldwide. LCS programmes herald a generational opportunity to simultaneously detect cancer and non-cancer-related early-stage lung disease, yet these efforts are hampered by a shortage of radiologists to interpret scans at scale. Here, we present TANGERINE, a computationally frugal, open-source vision foundation model for volumetric LDCT analysis.
methodsDesigned for broad accessibility and rapid adaptation, TANGERINE can be fine-tuned off the shelf for a wide range of disease-specific tasks with limited computational resources and training data. The model is pretrained using self-supervised learning on more than 98,000 thoracic LDCT scans, including the United Kingdom's largest LCS initiative to date and 27 public datasets. By extending a masked autoencoder framework to three-dimensional imaging, TANGERINE provides a scalable solution for LDCT analysis, combining architectural simplicity, public availability, and modest computational requirements.
resultsTANGERINE demonstrates superior computational and data efficiency in a retrospective multi-dataset analysis: it converges rapidly during fine-tuning, requiring significantly fewer graphics processing unit hours than models trained from scratch, and achieves comparable or superior performance using only a fraction of the fine-tuning data. The model achieves strong performance across 14 disease classification tasks, including lung cancer and multiple respiratory diseases, and generalises robustly across diverse clinical centres.
conclusionsTANGERINE's accessible, open-source, lightweight design lays the foundation for rapid integration into next-generation medical imaging tools, enabling lung cancer screening programmes to pivot from a singular focus on lung cancer detection toward comprehensive respiratory disease management in high-risk populations.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.