# IOSVLM: A 3D Vision-Language Model for Unified Dental Diagnosis from Intraoral Scans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 13 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [MedGemma Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05201/) (2025)
- [PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16911/) (2023)
- [ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17766/) (2024)
- [Hulu-Med: A Transparent Generalist Model towards Holistic Medical Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08668/) (2025)
- [DentVLM: A Multimodal Vision-Language Model for Comprehensive Dental Diagnosis and Enhanced Clinical Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23344/) (2025)
- [OralGPT-Omni: A Versatile Dental Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22055/) (2025)
- [TSegFormer: 3D Tooth Segmentation in Intraoral Scans with Geometry Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13234/) (2023)
- [DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Complex Reasoning in Dentistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11558/) (2025)
- [ArchMap: Arch-Flattening and Knowledge-Guided Vision Language Model for Tooth Counting and Structured Dental Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14336/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DentAgent: Evidence-Centric Multi-Agent Coordination for Multimodal Dental Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18878/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D intraoral scans (IOS) are increasingly adopted in routine dentistry due to abundant geometric evidence, and unified multi-disease diagnosis is desirable for clinical documentation and communication. While recent works introduce dental vision-language models (VLMs) to enable unified diagnosis and report generation on 2D images or multi-view images rendered from IOS, they do not fully leverage native 3D geometry. Such work is necessary and also challenging, due to: (i) heterogeneous scan forms and the complex IOS topology, (ii) multi-disease co-occurrence with class imbalance and fine-grained morphological ambiguity, (iii) limited paired 3D IOS-text data. Thus, we present IOSVLM, an end-to-end 3D VLM that represents scans as point clouds and follows a 3D encoder-projector-LLM design for unified diagnosis and generative visual question-answering (VQA), together with IOSVQA, a large-scale multi-source IOS diagnosis VQA dataset comprising 19,002 cases and 249,055 VQA pairs over 23 oral diseases and heterogeneous scan types. To address the distribution gap between color-free IOS data and color-dependent 3D pre-training, we propose a geometry-to-chromatic proxy that stabilizes fine-grained geometric perception and cross-modal alignment. A two-stage curriculum training strategy further enhances robustness. IOSVLM consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of at least +9.58% macro accuracy and +1.46% macro F1, indicating the effectiveness of direct 3D geometry modeling for IOS-based diagnosis.