# Describe Anything in Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05804/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 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 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 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, 20 of 20)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist's annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15029/) (2020)
- [DenseCap: Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07571/) (2015)
- [OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19389/) (2024)
- [Describe Anything: Detailed Localized Image and Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16072/) (2025)
- [SkinCon: A skin disease dataset densely annotated by domain experts for fine-grained model debugging and analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00785/) (2023)
- [Unifying 2D and 3D Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10745/) (2025)
- [Achieving Reliable and Fair Skin Lesion Diagnosis via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03157/) (2023)
- [HGTDP-DTA: Hybrid Graph-Transformer with Dynamic Prompt for Drug-Target Binding Affinity Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17697/) (2024)
- [Multi-dimension Transformer with Attention-based Filtering for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12328/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13219/) (2025)
- [MoRE-Brain: Routed Mixture of Experts for Interpretable and Generalizable Cross-Subject fMRI Visual Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15946/) (2025)
- [Describe Anything Model for Visual Question Answering on Text-rich Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12441/) (2025)
- [DescribeEarth: Describe Anything for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25654/) (2025)
- [LungNoduleAgent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent System for Precision Diagnosis of Lung Nodules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21042/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning MedGemma for Clinical Captioning to Enhance Multimodal RAG over Malaysia CPGs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15418/) (2025)
- [Lost in Distortion: Uncovering the Domain Gap Between Computer Vision and Brain Imaging -- A Study on Pretraining for Age Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01310/) (2025)
- [Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Dynamic Teacher Switching and Hierarchical Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14563/) (2026)
- [MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11197/) (2026)
- [Seeing Through the Tool: A Controlled Benchmark for Occlusion Robustness in Foundation Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11711/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Localized image captioning has made significant progress with models like the Describe Anything Model (DAM), which can generate detailed region-specific descriptions without explicit region-text supervision. However, such capabilities have yet to be widely applied to specialized domains like medical imaging, where diagnostic interpretation relies on subtle regional findings rather than global understanding. To mitigate this gap, we propose MedDAM, the first comprehensive framework leveraging large vision-language models for region-specific captioning in medical images. MedDAM employs medical expert-designed prompts tailored to specific imaging modalities and establishes a robust evaluation benchmark comprising a customized assessment protocol, data pre-processing pipeline, and specialized QA template library. This benchmark evaluates both MedDAM and other adaptable large vision-language models, focusing on clinical factuality through attribute-level verification tasks, thereby circumventing the absence of ground-truth region-caption pairs in medical datasets. Extensive experiments on the VinDr-CXR, LIDC-IDRI, and SkinCon datasets demonstrate MedDAM's superiority over leading peers (including GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, LLaMA-3.2 Vision, Qwen2.5-VL, GPT-4Rol, and OMG-LLaVA) in the task, revealing the importance of region-level semantic alignment in medical image understanding and establishing MedDAM as a promising foundation for clinical vision-language integration.