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A Survey of Medical Vision-and-Language Applications and Their Techniques

delete2026-08-03
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PRE
AI
Q
Qi Chen
R
Ruoshan Zhao
S
Sinuo Wang
V
Vu Minh Hieu Phan
A
Anton van den Hengel
J
Johan Verjans
Z
Zhibin Liao
M
Minh‐Son To
Y
Yong Xia
J
Jian Chen
Y
Yutong Xie *
Q
Qi Wu
DOI:10.1007/s11263-026-02973-2delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Medical vision-and-language models (MVLMs) have attracted substantial interest due to their capability to offer a natural language interface for interpreting complex medical data. Their applications are versatile and have the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy and decision-making for individual patients while also contributing to enhanced public health monitoring, disease surveillance, and policy-making through more efficient analysis of large data sets. MVLMS integrate natural language processing with medical images to enable a more comprehensive and contextual understanding of medical images alongside their corresponding textual information. Unlike general vision-and-language models trained on diverse, non-specialized datasets, MVLMs are purpose-built for the medical domain, automatically extracting and interpreting critical information from medical images and textual reports to support clinical decision-making. Popular clinical applications of MVLMs include automated medical report generation, medical visual question answering, medical multimodal segmentation, diagnosis and prognosis and medical image-text retrieval. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of MVLMs and the various medical tasks to which they have been applied. We conduct a detailed analysis of various vision-and-language model architectures, focusing on their distinct strategies for cross-modal integration/exploitation of medical visual and textual features. We also examine the datasets used for these tasks and compare the performance of different models based on standardized evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we highlight potential challenges and summarize future research trends and directions. The full collection of papers and codes is available at: https://github.com/YtongXie/Medical-Vision-and-Language-Tasks-and-Methodologies-A-Survey .
Keywords:
Vision and language
Medical applications
Survey

Journal

International Journal of Computer Vision cover
International Journal of Computer Vision
IF:
9.3
Papers:
3.9K
Citations:
2.8W

Organization

F
Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute
Scholars:
73
Papers: 28
Citations: 1
S
School of Software Engineering
Scholars:
99
Papers: 43
Citations: 0
S
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Scholars:
1.1K
Papers: 511
Citations: 2
A
Australian Institute for Machine Learning
Scholars:
31
Papers: 12
Citations: 0
Cited Papers

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Citing Papers