# MedGemma Technical Report

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 436 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 436)

- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08827/) (2025)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [MIRAGE: The Illusion of Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21687/) (2026)
- [MedGemma 1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05081/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [MedVLThinker: Simple Baselines for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02669/) (2025)
- [Pillar-0: A New Frontier for Radiology Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17803/) (2025)
- [Automating Expert-Level Medical Reasoning Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07988/) (2025)
- [EHR-R1: A Reasoning-Enhanced Foundational Language Model for Electronic Health Record Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25628/) (2025)
- [Med-CMR: A Fine-Grained Benchmark Integrating Visual Evidence and Clinical Logic for Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00818/) (2025)
- [UniMedVL: Unifying Medical Multimodal Understanding and Generation through Observation-Knowledge-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15710/) (2025)
- [MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26283/) (2026)
- [HealthFlow: A Self-Evolving AI Agent with Meta Planning for Autonomous Healthcare Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02621/) (2025)
- [S-Chain: Structured Visual Chain-of-Thought For Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22728/) (2025)
- [OralGPT-Omni: A Versatile Dental Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22055/) (2025)
- [Baichuan-M3: Modeling Clinical Inquiry for Reliable Medical Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06570/) (2026)
- [MedReasoner: Reinforcement Learning Drives Reasoning Grounding from Clinical Thought to Pixel-Level Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08177/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Agentic RAG System Training for Traceable Diagnostic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15746/) (2025)
- [OctoMed: Data Recipes for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23269/) (2025)
- [Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00908/) (2025)
- [IBISAgent: Reinforcing Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning in MLLMs for Universal Biomedical Object Referring and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03054/) (2026)
- [OmniCT: Towards a Unified Slice-Volume LVLM for Comprehensive CT Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16110/) (2026)
- [Improving Generative Ad Text on Facebook using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21983/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Reasoning Faithfulness in Medical Vision-Language Models using Multimodal Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11196/) (2025)
- [Scaling Artificial Intelligence for Multi-Tumor Early Detection with More Reports, Fewer Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14803/) (2025)
- [Evolving Interactive Diagnostic Agents in a Virtual Clinical Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24654/) (2025)
- [Revisiting 2D Foundation Models for Scalable 3D Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12887/) (2025)
- [ECG-R1: Protocol-Guided and Modality-Agnostic MLLM for Reliable ECG Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04279/) (2026)
- [CRIMSON: A Clinically-Grounded LLM-Based Metric for Generative Radiology Report Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06183/) (2026)
- [Agentic AI framework for End-to-End Medical Data Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18115/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential in healthcare applications, but its training and deployment faces challenges due to healthcare's diverse data, complex tasks, and the need to preserve privacy. Foundation models that perform well on medical tasks and require less task-specific tuning data are critical to accelerate the development of healthcare AI applications. We introduce MedGemma, a collection of medical vision-language foundation models based on Gemma 3 4B and 27B. MedGemma demonstrates advanced medical understanding and reasoning on images and text, significantly exceeding the performance of similar-sized generative models and approaching the performance of task-specific models, while maintaining the general capabilities of the Gemma 3 base models. For out-of-distribution tasks, MedGemma achieves 2.6-10% improvement on medical multimodal question answering, 15.5-18.1% improvement on chest X-ray finding classification, and 10.8% improvement on agentic evaluations compared to the base models. Fine-tuning MedGemma further improves performance in subdomains, reducing errors in electronic health record information retrieval by 50% and reaching comparable performance to existing specialized state-of-the-art methods for pneumothorax classification and histopathology patch classification. We additionally introduce MedSigLIP, a medically-tuned vision encoder derived from SigLIP. MedSigLIP powers the visual understanding capabilities of MedGemma and as an encoder achieves comparable or better performance than specialized medical image encoders. Taken together, the MedGemma collection provides a strong foundation of medical image and text capabilities, with potential to significantly accelerate medical research and development of downstream applications. The MedGemma collection, including tutorials and model weights, can be found at https://goo.gle/medgemma.
