Medical VQA

VQA: Visual Question Answering

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Overview

Medical visual question answering (MedVQA) asks models to interpret images such as X-rays, scans, pathology slides, and surgical videos in response to clinical questions, supporting tasks from finding specific abnormalities to integrating evidence across views or time. Common approaches adapt vision-language models with medical image-question datasets, while newer methods add region grounding, clinical knowledge, stepwise reasoning, or tools for measurements and image navigation. Benchmarks increasingly test spatial, temporal, multilingual, and multi-image reasoning, as well as whether answers actually depend on the visual evidence. A central challenge remains that high answer accuracy can coexist with shortcut use, hallucinations, poor calibration, or weak generalization across modalities and clinical settings.

Latest papers

CardsList

175 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, up 46% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. DALPHIN: Benchmarking Digital Pathology AI Copilots Against Pathologists on an Open Multicentric Dataset

    May 5, 2026Carlijn Lems, Sander Moonemans, Natálie Klubíčková +53Computational PathologyHealthcare

  2. SurgCheck: Do Vision-Language Models Really Look at Images in Surgical VQA?

    May 3, 2026Jongmin Shin, Ka Young Kim, Eunki Cho +2VLM EvaluationMedical VQA

    Department of Surgery, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul 06351, Republic of Korea · Kyung Hee University, Yongin 17104, Republic of Korea

  3. Auditing Frontier Vision-Language Models for Trustworthy Medical VQA: Grounding Failures, Format Collapse, and Domain Adaptation

    Apr 30, 2026Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le +5VLM EvaluationHealthcare

    New York University, New York, USA · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Columbia University, New York, USA +1

  4. Toward Multimodal Conversational AI for Age-Related Macular Degeneration

    Apr 28, 2026Ran Gu, Benjamin Hou, Mélanie Hébert +5Medical DiagnosisMedical VQA

    Division of Intramural Research, NaMonal Library of Medicine, NaMonal InsMtutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA · 2. Division of Epidemiology and Clinical ApplicaMons, NaMonal Eye InsMtute, NaMonal InsMtutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA · 1. Division of Intramural Research, NaMonal Library of Medicine, NaMonal InsMtutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

  5. X-PCR: A Benchmark for Cross-modality Progressive Clinical Reasoning in Ophthalmic Diagnosis

    Apr 22, 2026Gui Wang, Zehao Zhong, YongSong Zhou +6HealthcareMedical Diagnosis

    School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University · 2Tsinghua University · 5Wenzhou Medical University +3

  6. Dual Causal Inference: Integrating Backdoor Adjustment and Instrumental Variable Learning for Medical VQA

    Apr 22, 2026Zibo Xu, Qiang Li, Ke Lu +3Multimodal RobustnessMedical VQA

    School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China · Department of Orthopedics, Affiliated Kunshan Hospital of Jiangsu University, Jiangsu 215300, China · Department of Clinical Laboratory, The Third Central Hospital of Tianjin, Tianjin 300170, China +1

  7. PBSBench: A Multi-Level Vision-Language Framework and Benchmark for Hematopathology Whole Slide Image Interpretation

    Apr 19, 2026Yuanlong Wang, Weichi Chen, Adrian Rajab +4Computational PathologyMedical VQA

    The Ohio State University · The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

  8. Beyond a Single Frame: Multi-Frame Spatially Grounded Reasoning Across Volumetric MRI

    Apr 17, 2026Lama Moukheiber, Caleb M. Yeung, Haotian Xue +33D Spatial Reasoning3D Medical Imaging

    Georgia Institute of Technology · Harvard University · Georgetown University

  9. MetaDent: Labeling Clinical Images for Vision-Language Models in Dentistry

    Apr 16, 2026Meng-Xun Li, Wen-Hui Deng, Zhi-Xing Wu +6VLM EvaluationMedical Image Analysis

    Department of Prosthodontics, State Key Laboratory of Oral & Maxillofacial Reconstruction and Regeneration, Key Laboratory of Oral Biomedicine, Ministry of Education, Hubei Key Laboratory of Stomatology, School and Hospital of Stomatology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China · School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China +2

  10. Seeing Through Experts Eyes A Foundational Vision Language Model Trained on Radiologists Gaze and Reasoning

    Apr 15, 2026Kinhei Lee, Peiyuan Jing, Zhenxuan Zhang +5Radiology VLMsExplainable Medical Image Analysis

    Bioengineering Department and Imperial-X, Imperial College London, London W12 7SL, UK · College of physics and information engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350108, China · Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, London W12 0NN, UK +3

  11. Medical thinking with multiple images

    Apr 14, 2026Zonghai Yao, Benlu Wang, Yifan Zhang +8Medical VQAMultimodal Reasoning

    Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst · Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, VA Bedford Health Care · Department of Computer Science, Yale University +2

  12. Dialectic-Med: Mitigating Diagnostic Hallucinations via Counterfactual Adversarial Multi-Agent Debate

    Apr 13, 2026Zhixiang Lu, Jionglong SuVLM Hallucination MitigationMedical VLMs

    Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

  13. ReXSonoVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Procedure-Centric Ultrasound Understanding

    Apr 13, 2026Xucheng Wang, Xiaoman Zhang, Sung Eun Kim +2Medical VQAVideo QA

    Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

  14. Adapting 2D Multi-Modal Large Language Model for 3D CT Image Analysis

    Apr 11, 2026Yang Yu, Dunyuan Xu, Yaoqian Li +3Multimodal Large Language Models3D VLMs

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. · Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hong Kong, China. +1

  15. Improving Medical VQA through Trajectory-Aware Process Supervision

    Apr 10, 2026Halil Ibrahim Gulluk, Olivier GevaertMedical VQAMedical VLMs

    Electrical Engineering, Stanford University · Stanford Center For Biomedical Informatics Research

  16. MedLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

    Apr 10, 2026Suyang Xi, Songtao Hu, Yuxiang Lai +4Medical VQAMedical VLMs

    Department of Radiation Oncology and Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, 30322, GA, USA · Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Emory University, Atlanta, 30322, GA, USA

  17. MedVR: Annotation-Free Medical Visual Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 9, 2026Zheng Jiang, Heng Guo, Chengyu Fang +4VLM ReasoningVisual Reasoning

    Tsinghua University · DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group · Hupan Lab, 310023, Hangzhou, China +2

  18. Overconfidence and Calibration in Medical VQA: Empirical Findings and Hallucination-Aware Mitigation

    Apr 2, 2026Ji Young Byun, Young-Jin Park, Jean-Philippe Corbeil +1Vision-Language ModelsVLM Hallucination

    Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Microsoft Healthcare & Life Sciences

  19. An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Models

    Apr 1, 2026Lennart Maack, Alexander SchlaeferMedical VQASurgical Video Understanding

    Hamburg University of Technology, Germany

  20. KG-CMI: Knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction for medical visual question answering

    Apr 1, 2026Xianyao Zheng, Hong Yu, Hui Cui +7Medical VQAMedical VLMs

    School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shaanxi, China · Tianjin Central Hospital of Gynecology Obstetrics, Tianjin, China · Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia +6

  21. SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

    Mar 31, 2026Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Shih-Min Yin +7Medical VQASurgical Video Understanding

    University of Strasbourg, CNRS, INSERM, ICube, UMR7357, Strasbourg, France · IHU Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France · Department of General Surgery, Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Chang Gung University College of Medicine, Kaohsiung, Taiwan +1

  22. Learning to Trim: End-to-End Causal Graph Pruning with Dynamic Anatomical Feature Banks for Medical VQA

    Mar 27, 2026Zibo Xu, Qiang Li, Weizhi Nie +1Medical VQASpurious Correlation Robustness

    School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China · School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China

  23. Photon: Speedup Volume Understanding with Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

    Mar 26, 2026Chengyu Fang, Heng Guo, Zheng Jiang +3Medical VLMs3D VLMs

    Tsinghua University · DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group · Hupan Lab +1

  24. Deterministic Hallucination Detection in Medical VQA via Confidence-Evidence Bayesian Gain

    Mar 23, 2026Mohammad Asadi, Tahoura Nedaee, Jack W. O'Sullivan +2Hallucination Detection in VLMsHallucination Detection

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, CA, USA · Department of Biology, Stanford University, CA, USA · Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Stanford University, CA, USA +3

  25. ReXInTheWild: A Unified Benchmark for Medical Photograph Understanding

    Mar 19, 2026Oishi Banerjee, Sung Eun Kim, Alexandra N. Willauer +9Medical VLMsMedical Image Benchmarks

    Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA · National Strategic Technology Research Institute, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA +3

  26. Gastric-X: A Multimodal Multi-Phase Benchmark Dataset for Advancing Vision-Language Models in Gastric Cancer Analysis

    Mar 19, 2026Sheng Lu, Hao Chen, Rui Yin +3Medical VLMsMedical Image Benchmarks

    Ruijin Hospital · University of Cambridge · Nanjing First Hospital +2

  27. Instruction-Free Tuning of Large Vision Language Models for Medical Instruction Following

    Mar 19, 2026Myeongkyun Kang, Soopil Kim, Xiaoxiao Li +1Medical VLMsLarge Vision-Language Models

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada · Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 42988, Republic of Korea · Division of Intelligent Robot, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 42988, Republic of Korea +2

  28. VGS-Decoding: Visual Grounding Score Guided Decoding for Hallucination Mitigation in Medical VLMs

    Mar 19, 2026Govinda Kolli, Adinath Madhavrao Dukre, Behzad Bozorgtabar +2VLM Hallucination MitigationMedical VLMs

    MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, India · Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark +1

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

    Mar 17, 2026Huimin Xiong, Zijie Meng, Tianxiang Hu +33D VLMsMedical VLMs

    ZJU-UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University, Haining, 314400, China · Stomatology Hospital, School of Stomatology, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, 310058, China · Angelalign Research Institute, Angel Align Inc., Shanghai, 200011, China

  30. InViC: Intent-aware Visual Cues for Medical Visual Question Answering

    Mar 17, 2026Zhisong Wang, Ziyang Chen, Zanting Ye +3Medical VQAMedical VLMs

    National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China · Southern Medical University · Westlake University