Foundation Models in Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have catalyzed a paradigm shift in medical image analysis. Unlike traditional task-specific artificial intelligence (AI) models, FMs leverage large-scale datasets to learn generalized representations that can be adapted to downstream clinical applications. Despite the rapid proliferation of FM research in medical imaging, there is a lack of unified synthesis that systematically maps the evolution of architectures, training paradigms, and clinical applications across modalities. To address this gap, this review provides a comprehensive and structured synthesis of FMs in medical image analysis by systematically organizing studies into two primary categories: vision-only foundation models (VFMs) and vision-language foundation models (VLFMs), based on their architectural foundations, training strategies, and downstream clinical tasks. A quantitative analysis was conducted on both VFMs and VLFMs to characterize temporal trends in dataset utilization and application domains, along with pooled performance and subgroup analyses. We also critically discuss persistent challenges, including cross-domain generalization, computational scalability, FM evaluation, fairness, and deployment. Finally, we identify key future research directions aimed at enhancing the robustness, interpretability, and clinical integration of FMs, thereby accelerating their translation into real-world medical practice.