Tal Arbel

Biography

Tal Arbel is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, where she is the director of the Probabilistic Vision Group and Medical Imaging Lab in the Centre for Intelligent Machines.

She is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and an associate member of the Goodman Cancer Research Centre.

Arbel’s research focuses on the development of probabilistic deep learning methods in computer vision and medical image analysis for a wide range of real-world applications, with a focus on neurological diseases.

She is a recipient of the 2019 McGill Engineering Christophe Pierre Research Award and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She regularly serves on the organizing team of major international conferences in computer vision and in medical image analysis (e.g. MICCAI, MIDL, ICCV, CVPR). She is currently the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the arXiv overlay journal: Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA).

Current Students

Cornelius Crijnen

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Nima Fathi

Master's Research - McGill University

Gian Favero

Master's Research - McGill University

Elizabeth Laura Janes

Master's Research - McGill University

Emily Kaczmarek

PhD - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

Mohamed Mohamed

Master's Research - McGill University

Toky Raharison Ralambomihanta

Undergraduate - McGill University

Ryan Rezai

Master's Research - McGill University

Parham Saremi

Master's Research - McGill University

PRISM: An Explainable Generative AI Model for Medical Imaging

Xing Shen

Master's Research - McGill University

Master's Research - McGill University

Blog Posts

Image of an Xray and the DDIM process to generate counterfactual version of Xrays

July 1, 2025

Amar Kumar

Anita Kriz

Mohammed Havaei

Tal Arbel

Read the article

Publications

RL4Med-DDPO: Reinforcement Learning for Controlled Guidance Towards Diverse Medical Image Generation using Vision-Language Foundation Models

Mohammed Mohammed

2025-03-20

ArXiv (preprint)

PRISM: High-Resolution & Precise Counterfactual Medical Image Generation using Language-guided Stable Diffusion

Mohammad Havaei

Developing reliable and generalizable deep learning systems for medical imaging faces significant obstacles due to spurious correlations, da… (see more)ta imbalances, and limited text annotations in datasets. Addressing these challenges requires architectures robust to the unique complexities posed by medical imaging data. The rapid advancements in vision-language foundation models within the natural image domain prompt the question of how they can be adapted for medical imaging tasks. In this work, we present PRISM, a framework that leverages foundation models to generate high-resolution, language-guided medical image counterfactuals using Stable Diffusion. Our approach demonstrates unprecedented precision in selectively modifying spurious correlations (the medical devices) and disease features, enabling the removal and addition of specific attributes while preserving other image characteristics. Through extensive evaluation, we show how PRISM advances counterfactual generation and enables the development of more robust downstream classifiers for clinically deployable solutions. To facilitate broader adoption and research, we make our code publicly available at https://github.com/Amarkr1/PRISM.

2025-03-01

arXiv (published)

RL4Med-DDPO: Reinforcement Learning for Controlled Guidance Towards Diverse Medical Image Generation using Vision-Language Foundation Models

Parham Saremi

Mohammed Mohammed

Zahra Tehrani Nasab

2025-03-01

arXiv (published)

PRISM: High-Resolution&Precise Counterfactual Medical Image Generation using Language-guided Stable Diffusion

Mohammad Havaei

2025-02-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Conditional Diffusion Models are Medical Image Classifiers that Provide Explainability and Uncertainty for Free

Gian Mario Favero

Discriminative classifiers have become a foundational tool in deep learning for medical imaging, excelling at learning separable features of… (see more) complex data distributions. However, these models often need careful design, augmentation, and training techniques to ensure safe and reliable deployment. Recently, diffusion models have become synonymous with generative modeling in 2D. These models showcase robustness across a range of tasks including natural image classification, where classification is performed by comparing reconstruction errors across images generated for each possible conditioning input. This work presents the first exploration of the potential of class conditional diffusion models for 2D medical image classification. First, we develop a novel majority voting scheme shown to improve the performance of medical diffusion classifiers. Next, extensive experiments on the CheXpert and ISIC Melanoma skin cancer datasets demonstrate that foundation and trained-from-scratch diffusion models achieve competitive performance against SOTA discriminative classifiers without the need for explicit supervision. In addition, we show that diffusion classifiers are intrinsically explainable, and can be used to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions, increasing their trustworthiness and reliability in safety-critical, clinical contexts. Further information is available on our project page: https://faverogian.github.io/med-diffusion-classifier.github.io/

2025-02-06

ArXiv (preprint)

Improving Robustness and Reliability in Medical Image Classification with Latent-Guided Diffusion and Nested-Ensembles

Xing Shen

Hengguan Huang

Brennan Nichyporuk

2025-01-01

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (published)

Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models to Reveal Hidden Image-Attribute Relationships in Medical Imaging

Barak Pertzov

2025-01-01

CVPR Workshops (published)

The role of AI for MRI-analysis in multiple sclerosis—A brief overview

Jean-Pierre R. Falet

Steven Nobile

Aliya Szpindel

Berardino Barile

Joshua D. Durso-Finley

Douglas Arnold

2025-01-01

Frontiers Artif. Intell. (published)

Exploring Compound Loss Functions for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Raghav Mehta

Brennan Nichyporuk

2024-12-28

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (published)

Probabilistic Temporal Prediction of Continuous Disease Trajectories and Treatment Effects Using Neural SDEs

Joshua D. Durso-Finley

Berardino Barile

Jean-Pierre R. Falet

Douglas Arnold

Nick Pawlowski

Personalized medicine based on medical images, including predicting future individualized clinical disease progression and treatment respons… (see more)e, would have an enormous impact on healthcare and drug development, particularly for diseases (e.g. multiple sclerosis (MS)) with long term, complex, heterogeneous evolutions and no cure. In this work, we present the first stochastic causal temporal framework to model the continuous temporal evolution of disease progression via Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (NSDE). The proposed causal inference model takes as input the patient's high dimensional images (MRI) and tabular data, and predicts both factual and counterfactual progression trajectories on different treatments in latent space. The NSDE permits the estimation of high-confidence personalized trajectories and treatment effects. Extensive experiments were performed on a large, multi-centre, proprietary dataset of patient 3D MRI and clinical data acquired during several randomized clinical trials for MS treatments. Our results present the first successful uncertainty-based causal Deep Learning (DL) model to: (a) accurately predict future patient MS disability evolution (e.g. EDSS) and treatment effects leveraging baseline MRI, and (b) permit the discovery of subgroups of patients for which the model has high confidence in their response to treatment even in clinical trials which did not reach their clinical endpoints.

2024-10-03

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (published)

HyperFusion: A Hypernetwork Approach to Multimodal Integration of Tabular and Medical Imaging Data for Predictive Modeling

Daniel Duenias

Brennan Nichyporuk

Tammy Riklin-Raviv

The integration of diverse clinical modalities such as medical imaging and the tabular data obtained by the patients' Electronic Health Reco… (see more)rds (EHRs) is a crucial aspect of modern healthcare. The integrative analysis of multiple sources can provide a comprehensive understanding of a patient's condition and can enhance diagnoses and treatment decisions. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) consistently showcase outstanding performance in a wide range of multimodal tasks in the medical domain. However, the complex endeavor of effectively merging medical imaging with clinical, demographic and genetic information represented as numerical tabular data remains a highly active and ongoing research pursuit. We present a novel framework based on hypernetworks to fuse clinical imaging and tabular data by conditioning the image processing on the EHR's values and measurements. This approach aims to leverage the complementary information present in these modalities to enhance the accuracy of various medical applications. We demonstrate the strength and the generality of our method on two different brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) analysis tasks, namely, brain age prediction conditioned by subject's sex, and multiclass Alzheimer's Disease (AD) classification conditioned by tabular data. We show that our framework outperforms both single-modality models and state-of-the-art MRI-tabular data fusion methods. The code, enclosed to this manuscript will be made publicly available.

2024-03-20

ArXiv (preprint)