# PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 212 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14217/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07098/) (2022)
- [Overcoming Data Limitation in Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11867/) (2019)
- [MedICaT: A Dataset of Medical Images, Captions, and Textual References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06000/) (2020)
- [Align, Reason and Learn: Enhancing Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07118/) (2022)
- [EXSCLAIM! -- An automated pipeline for the construction of labeled materials imaging datasets from literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10631/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 212)

- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07044/) (2025)
- [HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19280/) (2024)
- [OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09181/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalist Foundation Model for Radiology by Leveraging Web-scale 2D&3D Medical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02463/) (2023)
- [M3D: Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00578/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05694/) (2023)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Medicine: Progress, Application, and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05112/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Models for Medical Report Generation and Visual Question Answering: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02469/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10833/) (2024)
- [Mini-InternVL: A Flexible-Transfer Pocket Multimodal Model with 5% Parameters and 90% Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16261/) (2024)
- [MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13085/) (2024)
- [MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02900/) (2024)
- [FG-CLIP: Fine-Grained Visual and Textual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05071/) (2025)
- [Can GPT-4V(ision) Serve Medical Applications? Case Studies on GPT-4V for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09909/) (2023)
- [Foundation Model for Advancing Healthcare: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03264/) (2024)
- [FairCLIP: Harnessing Fairness in Vision-Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19949/) (2024)
- [CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06007/) (2024)
- [Qilin-Med-VL: Towards Chinese Large Vision-Language Model for General Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17956/) (2023)
- [Large-Vocabulary Segmentation for Medical Images with Text Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17183/) (2023)
- [RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05131/) (2024)
- [PathAsst: A Generative Foundation AI Assistant Towards Artificial General Intelligence of Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15072/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Foundation Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10729/) (2024)
- [PRIOR: Prototype Representation Joint Learning from Medical Images and Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12577/) (2023)
- [ROCOv2: Radiology Objects in COntext Version 2, an Updated Multimodal Image Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10004/) (2024)
- [Towards a Visual-Language Foundation Model for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12914/) (2023)
- [Transcriptomics-guided Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11618/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models trained on large-scale dataset gain a recent surge in CV and NLP. In contrast, development in biomedical domain lags far behind due to data scarcity. To address this issue, we build and release PMC-OA, a biomedical dataset with 1.6M image-caption pairs collected from PubMedCentral's OpenAccess subset, which is 8 times larger than before. PMC-OA covers diverse modalities or diseases, with majority of the image-caption samples aligned at finer-grained level, i.e., subfigure and subcaption. While pretraining a CLIP-style model on PMC-OA, our model named PMC-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art results on various downstream tasks, including image-text retrieval on ROCO, MedMNIST image classification, Medical VQA, i.e. +8.1% R@10 on image-text retrieval, +3.9% accuracy on image classification.