Adversarial artificial intelligence in radiology: Attacks, defenses, and future considerations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming radiology, with applications spanning disease detection, lesion segmentation, workflow optimization, and report generation. As these tools become more integrated into clinical practice, new concerns have emerged regarding their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. This review provides an in-depth overview of adversarial AI in radiology, a topic of growing relevance in both research and clinical domains. It begins by outlining the foundational concepts and model characteristics that make machine learning systems particularly susceptible to adversarial manipulation. A structured taxonomy of attack types is presented, including distinctions based on attacker knowledge, goals, timing, and computational frequency. The clinical implications of these attacks are then examined across key radiology tasks, with literature highlighting risks to disease classification, image segmentation and reconstruction, and report generation. Potential downstream consequences such as patient harm, operational disruption, and loss of trust are discussed. Current mitigation strategies are reviewed, spanning input-level defenses, model training modifications, and certified robustness approaches. In parallel, the role of broader lifecycle and safeguard strategies are considered. By consolidating current knowledge across technical and clinical domains, this review helps identify gaps, inform future research priorities, and guide the development of robust, trustworthy AI systems in radiology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".