How Well Can General Vision-Language Models Learn Medicine By Watching Public Educational Videos?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thapa, Rahul, Li, Andrew, Wu, Qingyang, He, Bryan, Sahashi, Yuki, Binder, Christina, Zhang, Angela, Athiwaratkun, Ben, Song, Shuaiwen Leon, Ouyang, David, Zou, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thapa, Rahul
Li, Andrew
Wu, Qingyang
He, Bryan
Sahashi, Yuki
Binder, Christina
Zhang, Angela
Athiwaratkun, Ben
Song, Shuaiwen Leon
Ouyang, David
Zou, James
author_facet Thapa, Rahul
Li, Andrew
Wu, Qingyang
He, Bryan
Sahashi, Yuki
Binder, Christina
Zhang, Angela
Athiwaratkun, Ben
Song, Shuaiwen Leon
Ouyang, David
Zou, James
contents Publicly available biomedical videos, such as those on YouTube, serve as valuable educational resources for medical students. Unlike standard machine learning datasets, these videos are designed for human learners, often mixing medical imagery with narration, explanatory diagrams, and contextual framing. In this work, we investigate whether such pedagogically rich, yet non-standardized and heterogeneous videos can effectively teach general-domain vision-language models biomedical knowledge. To this end, we introduce OpenBiomedVi, a biomedical video instruction tuning dataset comprising 1031 hours of video-caption and Q/A pairs, curated through a multi-step human-in-the-loop pipeline. Diverse biomedical video datasets are rare, and OpenBiomedVid fills an important gap by providing instruction-style supervision grounded in real-world educational content. Surprisingly, despite the informal and heterogeneous nature of these videos, the fine-tuned Qwen-2-VL models exhibit substantial performance improvements across most benchmarks. The 2B model achieves gains of 98.7% on video tasks, 71.2% on image tasks, and 0.2% on text tasks. The 7B model shows improvements of 37.09% on video and 11.2% on image tasks, with a slight degradation of 2.7% on text tasks compared to their respective base models. To address the lack of standardized biomedical video evaluation datasets, we also introduce two new expert curated benchmarks, MIMICEchoQA and SurgeryVideoQA. On these benchmarks, the 2B model achieves gains of 99.1% and 98.1%, while the 7B model shows gains of 22.5% and 52.1%, respectively, demonstrating the models' ability to generalize and perform biomedical video understanding on cleaner and more standardized datasets than those seen during training. These results suggest that educational videos created for human learning offer a surprisingly effective training signal for biomedical VLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Well Can General Vision-Language Models Learn Medicine By Watching Public Educational Videos?
Thapa, Rahul
Li, Andrew
Wu, Qingyang
He, Bryan
Sahashi, Yuki
Binder, Christina
Zhang, Angela
Athiwaratkun, Ben
Song, Shuaiwen Leon
Ouyang, David
Zou, James
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Publicly available biomedical videos, such as those on YouTube, serve as valuable educational resources for medical students. Unlike standard machine learning datasets, these videos are designed for human learners, often mixing medical imagery with narration, explanatory diagrams, and contextual framing. In this work, we investigate whether such pedagogically rich, yet non-standardized and heterogeneous videos can effectively teach general-domain vision-language models biomedical knowledge. To this end, we introduce OpenBiomedVi, a biomedical video instruction tuning dataset comprising 1031 hours of video-caption and Q/A pairs, curated through a multi-step human-in-the-loop pipeline. Diverse biomedical video datasets are rare, and OpenBiomedVid fills an important gap by providing instruction-style supervision grounded in real-world educational content. Surprisingly, despite the informal and heterogeneous nature of these videos, the fine-tuned Qwen-2-VL models exhibit substantial performance improvements across most benchmarks. The 2B model achieves gains of 98.7% on video tasks, 71.2% on image tasks, and 0.2% on text tasks. The 7B model shows improvements of 37.09% on video and 11.2% on image tasks, with a slight degradation of 2.7% on text tasks compared to their respective base models. To address the lack of standardized biomedical video evaluation datasets, we also introduce two new expert curated benchmarks, MIMICEchoQA and SurgeryVideoQA. On these benchmarks, the 2B model achieves gains of 99.1% and 98.1%, while the 7B model shows gains of 22.5% and 52.1%, respectively, demonstrating the models' ability to generalize and perform biomedical video understanding on cleaner and more standardized datasets than those seen during training. These results suggest that educational videos created for human learning offer a surprisingly effective training signal for biomedical VLMs.
title How Well Can General Vision-Language Models Learn Medicine By Watching Public Educational Videos?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14391