Survey on Adversarial Attack and Defense for Medical Image Analysis: Methods and Challenges
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Abstract (arXiv)
Deep learning techniques have achieved superior performance in computer-aided medical image analysis, yet they are still vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, resulting in potential misdiagnosis in clinical practice. Oppositely, recent years have also witnessed remarkable progress in defense against these tailored adversarial examples in deep medical diagnosis systems. In this exposition, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in adversarial attacks and defenses for medical image analysis with a systematic taxonomy in terms of the application scenario. We also provide a unified framework for different types of adversarial attack and defense methods in the context of medical image analysis. For a fair comparison, we establish a new benchmark for adversarially robust medical diagnosis models obtained by adversarial training under various scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper that provides a thorough evaluation of adversarially robust medical diagnosis models. By analyzing qualitative and quantitative results, we conclude this survey with a detailed discussion of current challenges for adversarial attack and defense in medical image analysis systems to shed light on future research directions. Code is available on hrefhttps://github.com/tomvii/AdvMIAcolorredGitHub.
Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 116 of its 223 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2023.
Builds on
116 of 223 references.
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- 2024PromptSmooth: Certifying Robustness of Medical Vision-Language Models via Prompt Learningcited by 16
- 2023SoK: Pitfalls in Evaluating Black-Box Attackscited by 6
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learningcited by 5
- 2024Adversarially Robust Feature Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosiscited by 3
- 2026CogniVerse: Revolutionizing Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Cognitive Reflection and Geometric Reasoningcited by 3
- 2024SoK: Security and Privacy Risks of Healthcare AIcited by 2
- 2025Mind the Trojan Horse: Image Prompt Adapter Enabling Scalable and Deceptive Jailbreakingcited by 2
- 2026Hierarchically Robust Zero-shot Vision-language Modelscited by 1
- 2024Securing the Diagnosis of Medical Imaging: An In-depth Analysis of AI-Resistant Attackscited by 0
- 2025Are Vision Transformer Representations Semantically Meaningful? A Case Study in Medical Imagingcited by 0
- 2025Adversarial Training Improves Generalization Under Distribution Shifts in Bird Sound Classificationcited by 0
- 2025Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentationcited by 0
4 more
- 2026Exploring Sparsity and Smoothness of Arbitrary Lp Norms in Adversarial Attackscited by 0
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- 2026Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization for Instant Adversarial Purification in Histopathologycited by 0
- 2026A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directionscited by 0
- 2026A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directions9 Sep 2026
- 2026Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization for Instant Adversarial Purification in Histopathology7 Jun 2026
- 2026CogniVerse: Revolutionizing Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Cognitive Reflection and Geometric Reasoning28 May 2026
- 2026Hierarchically Robust Zero-shot Vision-language Models20 Apr 2026
- 2026Triggering hallucinations in model-based MRI reconstruction via adversarial perturbations20 Feb 2026
- 2026Exploring Sparsity and Smoothness of Arbitrary Lp Norms in Adversarial Attacks6 Feb 2026
- 2025Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentation17 Oct 2025
- 2025Adversarial Training Improves Generalization Under Distribution Shifts in Bird Sound Classification18 Jul 2025
- 2025Are Vision Transformer Representations Semantically Meaningful? A Case Study in Medical Imaging2 Jul 2025
- 2025Mind the Trojan Horse: Image Prompt Adapter Enabling Scalable and Deceptive Jailbreaking8 Apr 2025
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learning6 Mar 2025
- 2024SoK: Security and Privacy Risks of Healthcare AI11 Sep 2024
4 more
- 2024PromptSmooth: Certifying Robustness of Medical Vision-Language Models via Prompt Learning29 Aug 2024
- 2024Securing the Diagnosis of Medical Imaging: An In-depth Analysis of AI-Resistant Attacks1 Aug 2024
- 2024Adversarially Robust Feature Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis13 Feb 2024
- 2023SoK: Pitfalls in Evaluating Black-Box Attacks26 Oct 2023
- 2023SoK: Pitfalls in Evaluating Black-Box Attackscited by 6
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learningcited by 5
- 2024Adversarially Robust Feature Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosiscited by 3
- 2024SoK: Security and Privacy Risks of Healthcare AIcited by 2
- 2024Securing the Diagnosis of Medical Imaging: An In-depth Analysis of AI-Resistant Attackscited by 0
- 2025Are Vision Transformer Representations Semantically Meaningful? A Case Study in Medical Imagingcited by 0
- 2025Adversarial Training Improves Generalization Under Distribution Shifts in Bird Sound Classificationcited by 0
- 2025Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026Exploring Sparsity and Smoothness of Arbitrary Lp Norms in Adversarial Attackscited by 0
- 2026Triggering hallucinations in model-based MRI reconstruction via adversarial perturbationscited by 0
- 2026Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization for Instant Adversarial Purification in Histopathologycited by 0
- 2026A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directionscited by 0
- 2026A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directions9 Sep 2026
- 2026Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization for Instant Adversarial Purification in Histopathology7 Jun 2026
- 2026Triggering hallucinations in model-based MRI reconstruction via adversarial perturbations20 Feb 2026
- 2026Exploring Sparsity and Smoothness of Arbitrary Lp Norms in Adversarial Attacks6 Feb 2026
- 2025Rethinking Convergence in Deep Learning: The Predictive-Corrective Paradigm for Anatomy-Informed Brain MRI Segmentation17 Oct 2025
- 2025Adversarial Training Improves Generalization Under Distribution Shifts in Bird Sound Classification18 Jul 2025
- 2025Are Vision Transformer Representations Semantically Meaningful? A Case Study in Medical Imaging2 Jul 2025
- 2025Energy-Latency Attacks: A New Adversarial Threat to Deep Learning6 Mar 2025
- 2024SoK: Security and Privacy Risks of Healthcare AI11 Sep 2024
- 2024Securing the Diagnosis of Medical Imaging: An In-depth Analysis of AI-Resistant Attacks1 Aug 2024
- 2024Adversarially Robust Feature Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis13 Feb 2024
- 2023SoK: Pitfalls in Evaluating Black-Box Attacks26 Oct 2023