Side Quests

ME-VLIP: A Modular and Efficient Vision-Language Framework for Generalizable Medical Image Parsing
M. A. Shaaban, A. Saqib, S. E. Hardan, Darya Taratynova, T. J. Saleem, Mohammad Yaqub
FLARE Challenge @ MICCAI 2025 (1st place, Task 5)
A modular vision-language framework that parses medical images across modalities and tasks while staying light enough to run efficiently.
[paper]
```
@inproceedings{shaaban2025mevlip,
  title     = {ME-VLIP: A Modular and Efficient Vision-Language Framework for Generalizable Medical Image Parsing},
  author    = {Shaaban, M. A. and Saqib, A. and Hardan, S. E. and Taratynova, Darya and Saleem, T. J. and Yaqub, Mohammad},
  booktitle = {MICCAI 2025 FLARE Challenge},
  year      = {2025}
}
```

BRIQA: Balanced Reweighting in Image Quality Assessment of Pediatric Brain MRI

Alya Almsouti^*, Ainur Khamitova^*, Darya Taratynova^*, Mohammad Yaqub

LISA Challenge @ MICCAI 2025 (2nd place), Springer LNCS

Grades artifact severity in low-field pediatric brain MRI, balancing rare and common classes by reweighting each class's loss and rotating which classes the model sees in each batch.

[paper][arXiv][code]

@inproceedings{almsouti2026briqa,
  title     = {BRIQA: Balanced Reweighting in Image Quality Assessment of Pediatric Brain MRI},
  author    = {Almsouti, Alya and Khamitova, Ainur and Taratynova, Darya and Yaqub, Mohammad},
  booktitle = {Low Field Pediatric Brain Magnetic Resonance Image Segmentation and Quality Assurance (LISA 2025)},
  series    = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume    = {16411},
  publisher = {Springer},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-032-14417-1_1}
}

A Multimodal and Multi-centric Head and Neck Cancer Dataset for Segmentation, Diagnosis and Outcome Prediction
Numan Saeed, Salma Hassan, Shahad Hardan, Ahmed Aly, Darya Taratynova, Umair Nawaz, Ufaq Khan, Muhammad Ridzuan, et al., Mohammad Yaqub
arXiv preprint, 2025
A public dataset of 1,123 annotated PET/CT studies from 10 medical centers, with benchmarks for tumor segmentation, recurrence-free survival prediction, and HPV status classification.
[paper][arXiv]
```
@article{saeed2025headneck,
  title   = {A Multimodal and Multi-centric Head and Neck Cancer Dataset for Segmentation, Diagnosis and Outcome Prediction},
  author  = {Saeed, Numan and Hassan, Salma and Hardan, Shahad and Aly, Ahmed and Taratynova, Darya and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.00367},
  year    = {2025}
}
```

OpenThermalPose: An Open-Source Annotated Thermal Human Pose Dataset and Initial YOLOv8-Pose Baselines

Askat Kuzdeuov, Darya Taratynova, Alim Tleuliyev, Huseyin Atakan Varol

IEEE FG 2024

An open thermal-camera human pose dataset of about 6,000 images with 14,000+ annotated people in COCO keypoint format, with YOLOv8-Pose baselines.

[paper][code]

@inproceedings{kuzdeuov2024openthermalpose,
  title     = {OpenThermalPose: An Open-Source Annotated Thermal Human Pose Dataset and Initial YOLOv8-Pose Baselines},
  author    = {Kuzdeuov, Askat and Taratynova, Darya and Tleuliyev, Alim and Varol, Huseyin Atakan},
  booktitle = {2024 IEEE 18th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG)},
  pages     = {1--8},
  year      = {2024},
  doi       = {10.1109/FG59268.2024.10581992}
}

A Predictive Model of Arrival Times for Smart Shuttle Buses in Astana, Kazakhstan

Darya Taratynova, Assel Kassenova, Bissenbay Dauletbayev, Muammar Al-Shedivat, Eugene Pinsky

CSECS 2024 (EAI International Conference on Computer Science and Education in Computer Science)

Predicts when on-demand shuttle buses will reach each stop from past route data, using a simple, explainable nearest-neighbour model.

[paper]

@inproceedings{taratynova2024shuttle,
  title     = {A Predictive Model of Arrival Times for Smart Shuttle Buses in Astana, Kazakhstan},
  author    = {Taratynova, Darya and Kassenova, Assel and Dauletbayev, Bissenbay and Al-Shedivat, Muammar and Pinsky, Eugene},
  booktitle = {Computer Science and Education in Computer Science (CSECS 2024)},
  publisher = {Springer},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-031-84312-9_2}
}

ME-VLIP: A Modular and Efficient Vision-Language Framework for Generalizable Medical Image Parsing

BRIQA: Balanced Reweighting in Image Quality Assessment of Pediatric Brain MRI

A Multimodal and Multi-centric Head and Neck Cancer Dataset for Segmentation, Diagnosis and Outcome Prediction

OpenThermalPose: An Open-Source Annotated Thermal Human Pose Dataset and Initial YOLOv8-Pose Baselines

A Predictive Model of Arrival Times for Smart Shuttle Buses in Astana, Kazakhstan