iHEALTH student wins first place at the Chilean Congress of Radiology

Felipe Flores, medical student at UC and member of iHEALTH, won first place in the Oral Presentation category of the Undergraduate Session held during the Chilean Congress of Radiology on Saturday, October 11.

The award recognized his work titled “UC-CXR: Towards a public chest X-ray dataset with grounded reports for training AI models in radiology”, supervised by Dr. Cecilia Besa, UC Medicine professor and principal investigator at iHEALTH. The project involves the creation of a dataset that includes over 120,000 chest X-rays, along with their corresponding medical reports.

A large-scale collaborative project

“This dataset positions us among institutions such as Harvard or Stanford,” explains Felipe about the project developed jointly by researchers and students from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Millennium Institute iHEALTH. “Once complete, it will be the largest in Latin America and will include not only the images in DICOM format and their reports, but also a ‘grounding’ process that allows linking the findings in the report with the corresponding pixels in the image.”

The student highlights the collaborative nature of the work: “Each member contributes from their own expertise—computer science, medicine—and my role has been to bridge both worlds. I’m very grateful to the research group for the ambition of working on such a large dataset and for advancing explainable AI in radiology.”

Strengthening local AI with local data

The UC-CXR project seeks to address one of the main challenges in developing artificial intelligence for radiology: the lack of high-quality public datasets that represent Latin American reality. The inclusion of “grounding” in a subset of images will enable the training of more accurate and explainable AI models—those capable of pinpointing exactly where in the image their diagnostic decisions are based.

The research team also includes Dr. Denis Parra, UC School of Engineering professor and iHEALTH principal investigator, as well as UC PhD students Óscar Loch and Pablo Messina, and UC Master’s student Alonso Tamayo—reflecting the interdisciplinary approach that defines the institute.

The recognition earned by Felipe Flores at the Chilean Congress of Radiology underscores the growing role of undergraduate students in frontier research and highlights Chile’s potential to contribute to the development of AI tools tailored to the specific needs of the region.