Our laboratory has published a review article in The Innovation entitled "Prompt mechanisms in medical imaging: A comprehensive survey", published online on January 29, 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2026.101271).
Published by Cell Press, The Innovation is a high-impact interdisciplinary journal featuring cutting-edge research and authoritative reviews bridging science and real-world applications. The journal reports a 2024 Impact Factor of 25.7 and a CiteScore of 53.4, highlighting its strong international visibility and influence.
This survey reviews prompt mechanisms in medical imaging—covering textual prompts, visual prompts, and learnable embeddings—and discusses how prompts empower foundation models across key tasks such as image generation, segmentation, and classification, especially under practical clinical constraints like data scarcity, distribution shift, and the need for robust generalization.
As the leading team, the intelligent medical Computing Laboratory of Macau Polytechnic University has long focused on the cross research of AI and medical imaging. The publication of this review is not only a systematic review of the technology in the field, but also a concentrated embodiment of the concept of laboratory technology - upgrading AI from an "executive tool" to an "intelligent assistant for understanding clinical situations". In the future, the team will continue to promote the deep integration of prompt mechanism and clinical needs, and carry out technology transformation in the direction of early screening of breast cancer and multimodal disease diagnosis, so as to inject new momentum into the development of smart medicine in Macao and the Greater Bay region.