2026-09-20 / Signal #7
Alibaba open-sourced a CT-reading AI that beat most radiologists
“They put a radiologist on GitHub. It reads your abdomen better than most humans.”
The Story
DAMO Academy released RADAR, a vision-language model trained on 400,000+ contrast-enhanced abdominal CT exams and 15 million image–report pairs. On ~40,000 real exams it posted AUC 0.913 across 146 findings and, in a reader study, outperformed 23 of 26 radiologists while lifting their sensitivity ~10%. Code and weights are on GitHub/Hugging Face.
Why It Matters
The hospital’s second reader is now a file you can download. Institutions, bodies, and the moment diagnosis becomes an open-weight object.
Evidence
South China Morning Post, 18 Sep 2026; GitHub/DAMO.
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-09-20