Multimodal Large Language Models are Generalist Medical Image Interpreters

Medicine is undergoing a transformation with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Traditional AI models, though clinically useful and often matching or surpassing expert clinicians in specific tasks, face a scalability challenge due to the necessity of developing individual models for each task. Therefore, there is a push towards foundation models that are applicable to a wider set of tasks. Our study showcases how non-domain-specific, publicly available vision-language models can be employed as general foundation models for medical applications. We test our paradigm across four medical disciplines - pathology, dermatology, ophthalmology, and radiology - focusing on two use-cases within each discipline. We find that our approach beats existing pre-training methods and is competitive to domain-specific foundation models that require vast amounts of domain-specific training images. We also find that large vision-language models are data efficient and do not require large annotated datasets to reach competitive performance. This allows for the development of new or improved AI models in areas of medicine where data is scarce and will accelerate medical progress towards true multimodal foundation models.