# Vision Language Models in Medicine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01863/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 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 60 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adapting Vision-Language Models Without Labels: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05547/) (2025)
- [MedVR: Annotation-Free Medical Visual Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08203/) (2026)
- [Robust Fairness Vision-Language Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03153/) (2025)
- [AgentRx: A Benchmark Study of LLM Agents for Multimodal Clinical Prediction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10286/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19918/) (2025)
- [CURE: Curriculum-guided Multi-task Training for Reliable Anatomy Grounded Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15408/) (2026)
- [BreastGPT: A Multimodal Large Language Model for the Full Spectrum of Breast Cancer Clinical Routine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04911/) (2026)
- [PediatricsMQA: a Multi-modal Pediatrics Question Answering Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16439/) (2025)
- [Towards Responsible Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Context-Aligned Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08815/) (2026)
- [FADA: Accessible fetal ultrasound interpretation and annotation with a selectively distilled unified vision-language model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11106/) (2026)
- [Multilingual Hematology Visual Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25246/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Analysis of Continual Learning for Heterogeneous Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12048/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), medical artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced significant technological progress and paradigm shifts. This survey provides an extensive review of recent advancements in Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs), which integrate visual and textual data to enhance healthcare outcomes. We discuss the foundational technology behind Med-VLMs, illustrating how general models are adapted for complex medical tasks, and examine their applications in healthcare. The transformative impact of Med-VLMs on clinical practice, education, and patient care is highlighted, alongside challenges such as data scarcity, narrow task generalization, interpretability issues, and ethical concerns like fairness, accountability, and privacy. These limitations are exacerbated by uneven dataset distribution, computational demands, and regulatory hurdles. Rigorous evaluation methods and robust regulatory frameworks are essential for safe integration into healthcare workflows. Future directions include leveraging large-scale, diverse datasets, improving cross-modal generalization, and enhancing interpretability. Innovations like federated learning, lightweight architectures, and Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration are explored as pathways to democratize access and improve clinical relevance. This review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of Med-VLMs' strengths and limitations, fostering their ethical and balanced adoption in healthcare.