# BESTMVQA: A Benchmark Evaluation System for Medical Visual Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07867/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Pre-Training with Triple Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10401/) (2022)
- [LinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15827/) (2022)
- [Visual Question Answering: A Survey of Methods and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05910/) (2016)
- [Does CLIP Benefit Visual Question Answering in the Medical Domain as Much as it Does in the General Domain?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13906/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Data Limitation in Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11867/) (2019)
- [MMBERT: Multimodal BERT Pretraining for Improved Medical VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01394/) (2021)
- [Multiple Meta-model Quantifying for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08913/) (2021)
- [Towards Unifying Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-training via Soft Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08958/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention with Multi-Task Pre-Training for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00136/) (2021)
- [Pathological Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12435/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Vision Language Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01863/) (2025)
- [MedRepBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Report Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16674/) (2025)
- [Med-CRAFT: An Information System for Explainable and Configurable Construction of Multimodal Medical QA Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) is a very important task in healthcare industry, which answers a natural language question with a medical image. Existing VQA techniques in information systems can be directly applied to solving the task. However, they often suffer from (i) the data insufficient problem, which makes it difficult to train the state of the arts (SOTAs) for the domain-specific task, and (ii) the reproducibility problem, that many existing models have not been thoroughly evaluated in a unified experimental setup. To address these issues, this paper develops a Benchmark Evaluation SysTem for Medical Visual Question Answering, denoted by BESTMVQA. Given self-collected clinical data, our system provides a useful tool for users to automatically build Med-VQA datasets, which helps overcoming the data insufficient problem. Users also can conveniently select a wide spectrum of SOTA models from our model library to perform a comprehensive empirical study. With simple configurations, our system automatically trains and evaluates the selected models over a benchmark dataset, and reports the comprehensive results for users to develop new techniques or perform medical practice. Limitations of existing work are overcome (i) by the data generation tool, which automatically constructs new datasets from unstructured clinical data, and (ii) by evaluating SOTAs on benchmark datasets in a unified experimental setup. The demonstration video of our system can be found at https://youtu.be/QkEeFlu1x4A. Our code and data will be available soon.
