# HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 200 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 26 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [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)
- [HuatuoGPT, towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15075/) (2023)
- [PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/) (2023)
- [ALLaVA: Harnessing GPT4V-Synthesized Data for Lite Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11684/) (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)
- [HuatuoGPT-II, One-stage Training for Medical Adaption of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09774/) (2023)
- [CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06007/) (2024)
- [Multimodal ChatGPT for Medical Applications: an Experimental Study of GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19061/) (2023)
- [Apollo: A Lightweight Multilingual Medical LLM towards Democratizing Medical AI to 6B People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03640/) (2024)
- [Reformatted Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12219/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 200)

- [HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18925/) (2024)
- [Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07044/) (2025)
- [MedVLM-R1: Incentivizing Medical Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19634/) (2025)
- [Med-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Medical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13939/) (2025)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [LongLLaVA: Scaling Multi-modal LLMs to 1000 Images Efficiently via a Hybrid Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02889/) (2024)
- [MLLM can see? Dynamic Correction Decoding for Hallucination Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11779/) (2024)
- [MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13085/) (2024)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [CoD, Towards an Interpretable Medical Agent using Chain of Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13301/) (2024)
- [MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00555/) (2025)
- [MAM: Modular Multi-Agent Framework for Multi-Modal Medical Diagnosis via Role-Specialized Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19835/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [Medical World Model: Generative Simulation of Tumor Evolution for Treatment Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02327/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18142/) (2024)
- [Evidence-based diagnostic reasoning with multi-agent copilot for human pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20964/) (2025)
- [MedVLThinker: Simple Baselines for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02669/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Bilingual Multimodal Large Language Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18387/) (2024)
- [GMAI-VL & GMAI-VL-5.5M: A Large Vision-Language Model and A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset Towards General Medical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14522/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10991/) (2025)
- [ReflecTool: Towards Reflection-Aware Tool-Augmented Clinical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17657/) (2024)
- [E3D-GPT: Enhanced 3D Visual Foundation for Medical Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14200/) (2024)
- [Self-eXplainable AI for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02331/) (2024)
- [Towards Better Dental AI: A Multimodal Benchmark and Instruction Dataset for Panoramic X-ray Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09254/) (2025)
- [OmniV-Med: Scaling Medical Vision-Language Model for Universal Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14692/) (2025)
- [PA-LLaVA: A Large Language-Vision Assistant for Human Pathology Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09530/) (2024)
- [Citrus: Leveraging Expert Cognitive Pathways in a Medical Language Model for Advanced Medical Decision Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18274/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models for Medicine: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21051/) (2025)
- [Improving Medical Reasoning with Curriculum-Aware Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19213/) (2025)
- [Chiron-o1: Igniting Multimodal Large Language Models towards Generalizable Medical Reasoning via Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16962/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4V, has led to significant advancements. However, these models still face challenges in medical multimodal capabilities due to limitations in the quantity and quality of medical vision-text data, stemming from data privacy concerns and high annotation costs. While pioneering approaches utilize PubMed's large-scale, de-identified medical image-text pairs to address these limitations, they still fall short due to inherent data noise. To tackle this, we refined medical image-text pairs from PubMed and employed MLLMs (GPT-4V) in an 'unblinded' capacity to denoise and reformat the data, resulting in the creation of the PubMedVision dataset with 1.3 million medical VQA samples. Our validation demonstrates that: (1) PubMedVision can significantly enhance the medical multimodal capabilities of current MLLMs, showing significant improvement in benchmarks including the MMMU Health & Medicine track; (2) manual checks by medical experts and empirical results validate the superior data quality of our dataset compared to other data construction methods. Using PubMedVision, we train a 34B medical MLLM HuatuoGPT-Vision, which shows superior performance in medical multimodal scenarios among open-source MLLMs.