Charles Lau

Ryan G. Gomes, Bellington Vwalika, Chace Lee et al.

Despite considerable progress in maternal healthcare, maternal and perinatal deaths remain high in low-to-middle income countries. Fetal ultrasound is an important component of antenatal care, but shortage of adequately trained healthcare workers has limited its adoption. We developed and validated an artificial intelligence (AI) system that uses novice-acquired "blind sweep" ultrasound videos to estimate gestational age (GA) and fetal malpresentation. We further addressed obstacles that may be encountered in low-resourced settings. Using a simplified sweep protocol with real-time AI feedback on sweep quality, we have demonstrated the generalization of model performance to minimally trained novice ultrasound operators using low cost ultrasound devices with on-device AI integration. The GA model was non-inferior to standard fetal biometry estimates with as few as two sweeps, and the fetal malpresentation model had high AUC-ROCs across operators and devices. Our AI models have the potential to assist in upleveling the capabilities of lightly trained ultrasound operators in low resource settings.

Khaled Saab, Tao Tu, Wei-Hung Weng et al.

Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

Andrew Sellergren, Sahar Kazemzadeh, Tiam Jaroensri et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential in healthcare applications, but its training and deployment faces challenges due to healthcare's diverse data, complex tasks, and the need to preserve privacy. Foundation models that perform well on medical tasks and require less task-specific tuning data are critical to accelerate the development of healthcare AI applications. We introduce MedGemma, a collection of medical vision-language foundation models based on Gemma 3 4B and 27B. MedGemma demonstrates advanced medical understanding and reasoning on images and text, significantly exceeding the performance of similar-sized generative models and approaching the performance of task-specific models, while maintaining the general capabilities of the Gemma 3 base models. For out-of-distribution tasks, MedGemma achieves 2.6-10% improvement on medical multimodal question answering, 15.5-18.1% improvement on chest X-ray finding classification, and 10.8% improvement on agentic evaluations compared to the base models. Fine-tuning MedGemma further improves performance in subdomains, reducing errors in electronic health record information retrieval by 50% and reaching comparable performance to existing specialized state-of-the-art methods for pneumothorax classification and histopathology patch classification. We additionally introduce MedSigLIP, a medically-tuned vision encoder derived from SigLIP. MedSigLIP powers the visual understanding capabilities of MedGemma and as an encoder achieves comparable or better performance than specialized medical image encoders. Taken together, the MedGemma collection provides a strong foundation of medical image and text capabilities, with potential to significantly accelerate medical research and development of downstream applications. The MedGemma collection, including tutorials and model weights, can be found at https://goo.gle/medgemma.

Sahar Kazemzadeh, Jin Yu, Shahar Jamshy et al.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a top-10 cause of death worldwide. Though the WHO recommends chest radiographs (CXRs) for TB screening, the limited availability of CXR interpretation is a barrier. We trained a deep learning system (DLS) to detect active pulmonary TB using CXRs from 9 countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe, and utilized large-scale CXR pretraining, attention pooling, and noisy student semi-supervised learning. Evaluation was on (1) a combined test set spanning China, India, US, and Zambia, and (2) an independent mining population in South Africa. Given WHO targets of 90% sensitivity and 70% specificity, the DLS's operating point was prespecified to favor sensitivity over specificity. On the combined test set, the DLS's ROC curve was above all 9 India-based radiologists, with an AUC of 0.90 (95%CI 0.87-0.92). The DLS's sensitivity (88%) was higher than the India-based radiologists (75% mean sensitivity), p<0.001 for superiority; and its specificity (79%) was non-inferior to the radiologists (84% mean specificity), p=0.004. Similar trends were observed within HIV positive and sputum smear positive sub-groups, and in the South Africa test set. We found that 5 US-based radiologists (where TB isn't endemic) were more sensitive and less specific than the India-based radiologists (where TB is endemic). The DLS also remained non-inferior to the US-based radiologists. In simulations, using the DLS as a prioritization tool for confirmatory testing reduced the cost per positive case detected by 40-80% compared to using confirmatory testing alone. To conclude, our DLS generalized to 5 countries, and merits prospective evaluation to assist cost-effective screening efforts in radiologist-limited settings. Operating point flexibility may permit customization of the DLS to account for site-specific factors such as TB prevalence, demographics, clinical resources, and customary practice patterns.