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. GreenRFM: Learning a resource-efficient radiology vision-language foundation model via supervision-centric pre-training

    Mar 6, 2026Yingtai Li, Shuai Ming, Qiuli Wang +13Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsRadiology VLMs

  2. ProFound: A moderate-sized vision foundation model for multi-task prostate imaging

    Mar 4, 2026Yipei Wang, Yinsong Xu, Weixi Yi +11Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Image Representation Learning

  3. Specializing Foundation Models via Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Comprehensive Head CT Analysis

    Feb 28, 2026Youngjin Yoo, Han Liu, Bogdan Georgescu +14Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsLow-Rank Adaptation

  4. Extending 2D foundational DINOv3 representations to 3D segmentation of neonatal brain MR images

    Feb 27, 2026Annayah Usman, Behraj Khan, Tahir Qasim SyedMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

  5. Topology-Driven Transferability Estimation of Medical Foundation Models for Segmentation

    Feb 27, 2026Jiaqi Tang, Shaoyang Zhang, Xiaoqi Wang +3Task Transferability EstimationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  6. Few-Shot Continual Learning for 3D Brain MRI with Frozen Foundation Models

    Feb 26, 2026Chi-Sheng Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Guan-Ying Chen +3Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsBrain MRI

  7. A data- and compute-efficient chest X-ray foundation model beyond aggressive scaling

    Feb 26, 2026Chong Wang, Yabin Zhang, Yunhe Gao +9Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical VLMs

  8. OrthoDiffusion: A Generalizable Multi-Task Diffusion Foundation Model for Musculoskeletal MRI Interpretation

    Feb 24, 2026Tian Lan, Lei Xu, Zimu Yuan +8Diffusion Models for Medical Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  9. GUIDE-US: Grade-Informed Unpaired Distillation of Encoder Knowledge from Histopathology to Micro-UltraSound

    Feb 22, 2026Emma Willis, Tarek Elghareb, Paul F. R. Wilson +6Ultrasound Image ClassificationProstate Cancer Grading

  10. Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Brain MRI with 2D Foundation Models

    Feb 17, 2026Tai Le-Gia, Jaehyun AhnMedical Image Anomaly DetectionZero-Shot Anomaly Detection

  11. Foundation Models for Medical Imaging: Status, Challenges, and Directions

    Feb 17, 2026Chuang Niu, Pengwei Wu, Bruno De Man +1Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsMedical Imaging

  12. Scalable next-scale autoregression for medical image generation across anatomical regions

    Feb 16, 2026Zhicheng He, Yunpeng Zhao, Junde Wu +7Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsHealthcare

  13. Vascular anatomy-aware self-supervised pre-training for X-ray angiogram analysis

    Feb 12, 2026De-Xing Huang, Chaohui Yu, Xiao-Hu Zhou +8Medical Image Representation LearningMedical Imaging

  14. TotalFM: An Organ-Separated 3D-CT Foundation Model Leveraging Large-Scale Routine Clinical Radiology Data

    Jan 1, 2026Kohei Yamamoto, Tomohiro Kikuchi3D Foundation ModelsMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  15. Atlas is Your Perfect Context: One-Shot Customization for Generalizable Foundational Medical Image Segmentation

    Dec 20, 2025Ziyu Zhang, Yi Yu, Simeng Zhu +4Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  16. MedSAM3: Delving into Segment Anything with Medical Concepts

    Nov 24, 2025Anglin Liu, Xu R. Cao, Yifan Shen +4Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

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

    Oct 19, 2025Praveenbalaji Rajendran, Mojtaba Safari, Wenfeng He +4Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsVision Foundation Models

  18. Scaling Vision Transformers for Functional MRI with Flat Maps

    Oct 15, 2025Connor Lane, Mihir Tripathy, Leema Krishna Murali +15fMRI Foundation ModelsMasked Autoencoders

  19. Evaluating Fundus-Specific Foundation Models for Diabetic Macular Edema Detection

    Oct 8, 2025Franco Javier Arellano, José Ignacio OrlandoMedical Imaging Foundation ModelsVision Foundation Model Adaptation

  20. FoundDiff: Foundational Diffusion Model for Generalizable Low-Dose CT Denoising

    Aug 24, 2025Zhihao Chen, Qi Gao, Zilong Li +4Diffusion Models for Image RestorationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  21. Good Enough? An Investigation on the Impact of Label Quality in Large-Scale Medical Datasets

    May 27, 2025Alexander Jaus, Zdravko Marinov, Constantin Seibold +4Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models

  22. Synergistic Vision-Language Reinforcement Enables Scalable On-Demand Analysis across Diverse Clinical Tasks

    May 6, 2025Haonan Wang, Jiaji Mao, Lehan Wang +11Image SegmentationMedical Imaging Foundation Models