OmniBrainBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Benchmark for Brain Imaging Analysis Across Multi-stage Clinical Tasks
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
Brain imaging analysis is crucial for diagnosing and treating brain disorders, and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly supporting it. However, current brain imaging visual question-answering (VQA) benchmarks either cover a limited number of imaging modalities or are restricted to coarse-grained pathological descriptions, hindering a comprehensive assessment of MLLMs across the full clinical continuum. To address these, we introduce OmniBrainBench, the first comprehensive multimodal VQA benchmark specifically designed to assess the multimodal comprehension capabilities of MLLMs in brain imaging analysis with closed- and open-ended evaluations. OmniBrainBench comprises 15 distinct brain imaging modalities collected from 30 verified medical sources, yielding 9,527 validated VQA pairs and 31,706 images. It simulates clinical workflows and encompasses 15 multi-stage clinical tasks rigorously validated by a professional radiologist. Evaluations of 24 state-of-the-art models, including open-source general-purpose, medical, and proprietary MLLMs, highlight the substantial challenges posed by OmniBrainBench. Experiments reveal that proprietary MLLMs like GPT-5 (63.37%) outperform others yet lag far behind physicians (91.35%), while medical ones show wide variance in closed- and open-ended VQA. Open-source general-purpose MLLMs generally trail but excel in specific tasks, and all ones fall short in complex preoperative reasoning, revealing a critical visual-to-clinical gap. OmniBrainBench establishes a new standard to assess MLLMs in brain imaging analysis, highlighting the gaps against physicians. We publicly release our benchmark at link.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 38 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2025.
Builds on
38 of 76 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning8 Jun
- 2025EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysis29 May
- 2025NOVA: A Benchmark for Anomaly Localization and Clinical Reasoning in Brain MRI20 May
- 2025Multimodal Large Language Models for Medicine: A Comprehensive Survey29 Apr
- 2025MedVLM-R1: Incentivizing Medical Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) via Reinforcement Learning26 Feb
- 2024MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine6 Aug
- 2024M3D: Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Multi-Modal Large Language Models31 Mar
- 2024OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM14 Feb
- 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day1 Jun
Other references · 29
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,764
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
- 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learningcited by 4,337
- 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generationcited by 4,310
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
- 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
- 2019CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparisoncited by 1,410
17 more
- 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
- 2021The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classificationcited by 507
- 2024MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmarkcited by 494
- 2018fastMRI: An Open Dataset and Benchmarks for Accelerated MRIcited by 464
- 2021SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 444
- 2025MedGemma Technical Reportcited by 398
- 2023PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 333
- 2024HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMscited by 257
- 2025MedXpertQA: Benchmarking Expert-Level Medical Reasoning and Understandingcited by 212
- 2022ISLES 2022: A multi-center magnetic resonance imaging stroke lesion segmentation datasetcited by 104
- 2023The ASNR-MICCAI Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2023: Intracranial Meningiomacited by 51
- 2023Surgical-VQLA: Transformer with Gated Vision-Language Embedding for Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgerycited by 44
- 2023The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS-METS) Challenge 2023: Brain Metastasis Segmentation on Pre-treatment MRIcited by 35
- 2025MedFrameQA: A Multi-Image Medical VQA Benchmark for Clinical Reasoningcited by 33
- 2022Learning Spatio-Temporal Model of Disease Progression with NeuralODEs from Longitudinal Volumetric Datacited by 19
- 2025OpenMIBOOD: Open Medical Imaging Benchmarks for Out-Of-Distribution Detectioncited by 13
- 2025MultiMorph: On-demand Atlas Constructioncited by 9
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026Brain-WM: Brain Glioblastoma World Modelcited by 5
- 2026Agentic Large Language Models for Training-Free Neuro-Radiological Image Analysiscited by 4
- 2026Unveiling and Bridging the Functional Perception Gap in MLLMs: Atomic Visual Alignment and Hierarchical Evaluation via PET-Benchcited by 3
- 2026MedPruner: Training-Free Hierarchical Token Pruning for Efficient 3D Medical Image Understanding in Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026UniField: A Unified Field-Aware MRI Enhancement Frameworkcited by 0
- 2026NeuroVLM-Bench: Evaluation of Vision-Enabled Large Language Models for Clinical Reasoning in Neurological Disorderscited by 0
- 2026NeuroQA: A Large-Scale Image-Grounded Benchmark for 3D Brain MRI Understandingcited by 0
- 2026NeuroQA: A Large-Scale Image-Grounded Benchmark for 3D Brain MRI Understanding19 May 2026
- 2026Agentic Large Language Models for Training-Free Neuro-Radiological Image Analysis17 Apr 2026
- 2026NeuroVLM-Bench: Evaluation of Vision-Enabled Large Language Models for Clinical Reasoning in Neurological Disorders25 Mar 2026
- 2026MedPruner: Training-Free Hierarchical Token Pruning for Efficient 3D Medical Image Understanding in Vision-Language Models12 Mar 2026
- 2026UniField: A Unified Field-Aware MRI Enhancement Framework10 Mar 2026
- 2026Brain-WM: Brain Glioblastoma World Model8 Mar 2026
- 2026Unveiling and Bridging the Functional Perception Gap in MLLMs: Atomic Visual Alignment and Hierarchical Evaluation via PET-Bench6 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026UCSF-PDGM-VQA: Visual Question Answering dataset for brain tumor MRI interpretation
- 2025Beyond Classification Accuracy: Neural-MedBench and the Need for Deeper Reasoning Benchmarks
- 2025RadImageNet-VQA: A Large-Scale CT and MRI Dataset for Radiologic Visual Question Answering
- 2025SpineBench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs for Spinal Pathology Analysis
- 2026EyeVQA: Benchmarking Ophthalmic Vision-Language Models from Recognition to Spatial Grounding
- 2025MedErr-CT: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Identifying and Correcting Errors in CT Reports
- 2025FunBench: Benchmarking Fundus Reading Skills of MLLMs
- 2024PeFoMed: Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models for Medical Imaging