Medical Imaging Foundation Models

Overview

Medical imaging foundation models aim to learn reusable features from large collections of images, scans, and sometimes paired clinical reports, then apply them to tasks such as diagnosis, segmentation, measurement, and report generation. Common approaches include self-supervised learning, masked-image prediction, vision-language contrastive learning, and generative models, with both 2D and volumetric methods for modalities such as radiology, MRI, ultrasound, pathology, and retinal imaging. Researchers adapt these models through fine-tuning, lightweight adapters such as LoRA, frozen-feature probes, or prompts, and assess them on classification, segmentation, and cross-center benchmarks. A central tension is whether broad pretraining reliably helps specific clinical tasks: results vary by modality and task, and robustness to shifts in scanners, populations, and institutions remains essential to establish before deployment.

Latest papers

CardsList

235 papers21 papers in the last four weeks, down 28% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. A 211K Parameter Foundation Model: Genetic Prompting in Neural Cellular Automata

    Oct 28, 2026John Kalkhof, Niklas Ihm, Daniel Kirste +1Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsZero-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

  2. MedVTok: A General-Purpose Medical Visual Tokenizer

    Oct 26, 2026Chenglong Ma, Yuanfeng Ji, Junzhi Ning +18Image TokenizationVisual Tokenization

  3. LapaFM: A Laparoscopic Foundation Model via Multi-Stage Continual Learning

    Oct 23, 2026Xiaobo Zhu, Shiwei Wu, Yu An +21Surgical Video UnderstandingMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  4. From Adults to Children: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Chest X-Ray Classification under Domain Shift

    Oct 15, 2026Sara Inácio, Hugo Proença, João C. NevesMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsChest X-Ray Classification

  5. Quantifying privacy risks in foundation model representations of brain MRI

    Oct 14, 2026Imen Bajar, Héber Hwang Arcolezi, Antoine Boutet +2Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsPrivacy-Preserving ML

  6. Continual pretraining Prostate MRI ViT Encoder for task alignment

    Oct 14, 2026Bilal A. Sidiqi, Yipei Wang, Shaheer U. Saeed +3Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsContinued Pretraining

  7. Beyond the Encoder: Object-Centric Representations Emerging from Segmentation Foundation Models

    Oct 13, 2026Michalis Pistos, Bartłomiej W. PapieżCancer Subtype ClassificationObject-Centric Representation Learning

  8. dMRI-F: A Foundation Model for Generalizable Diffusion MRI Analysis from Sparse Acquisitions

    Oct 13, 2026Xi Zhu, Yijie Li, Xiaofan Wang +4Diffusion MRIMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  9. Benchmarking Self-Supervised 3D Medical Vision Foundation Models and Transferability Estimation

    Oct 13, 2026Jiaqi Tang, Yu Wang, Yang Liu +7Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Benchmarks

  10. Exploring the Latent Structure of AMD Severity Using Retinal Foundation Models

    Oct 9, 2026Niccolò Fineschi, Jovana Panic, Atsushi Watanabe +7Medical Image Representation LearningMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  11. A4-MR: Abnormality Aware Anatomical Alignment for MR

    Oct 9, 2026Noel D'souza, Zhijian Yang, Nishank Singla +15Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsRadiology VLMs

  12. Dataset-Specific Encoding of Image Content Underlies Cross-Dataset Failure in Brain MRI Foundation Models

    Oct 9, 2026Minh Sao Khue Luu, Bair N. TuchinovMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Representation Learning

  13. Comprehensive Evaluation and Fine-Tuning of Foundational Cell Nuclei Segmentation Models in Renal Pathology

    Oct 6, 2026Ruijie Wu, Junlin Guo, Ruining Deng +4Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsFine-Tuning

  14. EchoDino: A pediatric foundation model for transferable echocardiographic analysis across the lifespan

    Oct 4, 2026Sheng Cheng, Donnchadh M. O'Sullivan, Daniel J. Penny +3Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsSelf-Supervised Learning

  15. Bridging Research and Practice: A Systematic Evaluation of Generalist and Dermatology-Specific Models in Clinical Skin Lesion Classification

    Oct 2, 2026Emanoel dos Santos, Kelvin Cunha, Rodrigo Mota +8Skin Lesion ClassificationDermatology

  16. Image-Based Breast Implant Detection for Mammography Dataset Curation and Near-Real-Time Deployment: Comparing Foundation Models and Task-Specific Convolutional Models

    Oct 1, 2026Vasisht Ishwar, Hari Trivedi, Young Seok Jeon +5Medical Image ClassificationMammography Image Classification

  17. From Image Latent Space to Fuzzy Rules: Interpretable Analysis of Gastrointestinal Foundation Model

    Sep 30, 2026Michael D. Vasilakakis, Dimitris K. IakovidisMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Classification

  18. Med-RADIO: Reducing All Medical Domains Into One via Multi-Teacher Distillation

    Sep 29, 2026Chu Zhang, Haoyu Jiang, Hongyuan Zhang +2Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Classification

  19. TomoTransformer: Towards a Foundation Model for CT Reconstruction

    Sep 29, 2026AmirEhsan Khorashadizadeh, Benjamín BéjarMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsImage Reconstruction

  20. Reduce, Then Encode: Multiscale Volumetric Reduction for 2D Foundation Models in Brain MRI

    Sep 28, 2026Dexuan Ding, Yuankai Qi, Bogong Wang +2Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsDimensionality Reduction

  21. Natural Image Autoencoder-Based fMRI Representations for Trait and State Prediction

    Sep 28, 2026Juhyeon Park, Yeonwoo Kim, Peter Yongho Kim +5Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsfMRI Foundation Models

  22. KneePreM: Towards 3D Knee MRI Foundation Models via Large-Scale Unlabeled Pretraining and Label-Efficient Fine-Tuning

    Sep 25, 2026Xinxin Wang, Liam Hazan, Jing Li +3Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

  23. Combining General and Domain-Specific Pretext Tasks for Brain MR Image Segmentation

    Sep 25, 2026Tasneem Nasser, Susanne Schmid, Roberto Souza +1Medical Image Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

  24. UltraBench 2: Towards Robust Evaluation of Vision Foundation Models on Ultrasound

    Sep 23, 2026Ashwath Radhachandran, Adam Tupper, Christian Gagné +1Ultrasound Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  25. A generalizable structural brain MRI foundation model via dual-priority federated pretraining

    Sep 23, 2026Zhen Yu, Yang Liu, Jianfeng Feng +2Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsFederated Learning Aggregation

  26. A Scaling Study for fMRI Foundation Models

    Sep 23, 2026Wenhao Ye, Xuanye Pan, Junfeng Xia +3Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsfMRI Foundation Models

  27. nnFoundation: 3D Foundation Models for Radiology

    Sep 22, 2026Constantin Ulrich Harsy, Tassilo Wald, Karol Gotkowski +803D Foundation ModelsMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  28. Foundation model embeddings capture pre-diagnostic changes on screening mammograms

    Sep 22, 2026Kalina P. Slavkova, Eric Brattain, Aditya Gowd +6Breast CancerMedical Imaging Foundation Models