# Medical Multimodal Foundation Models in Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment: Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02621/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 104 of its 182 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 104)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14886/) (2025)
- [Med-GLIP: Advancing Medical Language-Image Pre-training with Large-scale Grounded Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10528/) (2025)
- [Applications of Large Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17132/) (2025)
- [HeartcareGPT: A Unified Multimodal ECG Suite for Dual Signal-Image Modeling and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05831/) (2025)
- [MedIQA: A Scalable Foundation Model for Prompt-Driven Medical Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19004/) (2025)
- [MedInsightBench: Evaluating Medical Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Discovery in Multimodal Medical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13297/) (2025)
- [VOLMO: Versatile and Open Large Models for Ophthalmology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23953/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Foundation Models for Early Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01899/) (2025)
- [Aligning Clinical Needs and AI Capabilities: A Survey on LLMs for Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07761/) (2026)
- [Protecting patient privacy in clinical foundation models: Technical and legal perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07705/) (2026)
- [CLAPS: A CLIP-Unified Auto-Prompt Segmentation for Multi-Modal Retinal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08618/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Fundus-Specific Foundation Models for Diabetic Macular Edema Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07277/) (2025)
- [Can Large Language Models Function as Qualified Pediatricians? A Systematic Evaluation in Real-World Clinical Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13381/) (2025)
- [A Vision for Multisensory Intelligence: Sensing, Science, and Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04563/) (2026)
- [Imaging-anchored multiomics in cardiovascular disease: integrating cardiac imaging, bulk, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07871/) (2026)
- [Foundation Models for Medical Imaging: Status, Challenges, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15913/) (2026)
- [Modeling Local, Global, and Cross-Modal Context in Multimodal 3D MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26894/) (2026)
- [In-Context Learning for Wound Classification with Small Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18819/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly revolutionized the field of clinical diagnosis and treatment, offering novel approaches to improve diagnostic precision and treatment efficacy across diverse clinical domains, thus driving the pursuit of precision medicine. The growing availability of multi-organ and multimodal datasets has accelerated the development of large-scale Medical Multimodal Foundation Models (MMFMs). These models, known for their strong generalization capabilities and rich representational power, are increasingly being adapted to address a wide range of clinical tasks, from early diagnosis to personalized treatment strategies. This review offers a comprehensive analysis of recent developments in MMFMs, focusing on three key aspects: datasets, model architectures, and clinical applications. We also explore the challenges and opportunities in optimizing multimodal representations and discuss how these advancements are shaping the future of healthcare by enabling improved patient outcomes and more efficient clinical workflows.