Does DINOv3 Set a New Medical Vision Standard? Benchmarking 2D and 3D Classification, Segmentation, and Registration

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Main Authors: Liu, Che, Chen, Yinda, Shi, Haoyuan, Lu, Jinpeng, Jian, Bailiang, Pan, Jiazhen, Cai, Linghan, Wang, Jiayi, Yu, Jieming, Gao, Ziqi, Zhang, Xiaoran, Bai, Long, Zhang, Yundi, Li, Jun, Bercea, Cosmin I., Ouyang, Cheng, Chen, Chen, Xiong, Zhiwei, Wiestler, Benedikt, Wachinger, Christian, Duncan, James S., Rueckert, Daniel, Bai, Wenjia, Arcucci, Rossella
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Che
Chen, Yinda
Shi, Haoyuan
Lu, Jinpeng
Jian, Bailiang
Pan, Jiazhen
Cai, Linghan
Wang, Jiayi
Yu, Jieming
Gao, Ziqi
Zhang, Xiaoran
Bai, Long
Zhang, Yundi
Li, Jun
Bercea, Cosmin I.
Ouyang, Cheng
Chen, Chen
Xiong, Zhiwei
Wiestler, Benedikt
Wachinger, Christian
Duncan, James S.
Rueckert, Daniel
Bai, Wenjia
Arcucci, Rossella
author_facet Liu, Che
Chen, Yinda
Shi, Haoyuan
Lu, Jinpeng
Jian, Bailiang
Pan, Jiazhen
Cai, Linghan
Wang, Jiayi
Yu, Jieming
Gao, Ziqi
Zhang, Xiaoran
Bai, Long
Zhang, Yundi
Li, Jun
Bercea, Cosmin I.
Ouyang, Cheng
Chen, Chen
Xiong, Zhiwei
Wiestler, Benedikt
Wachinger, Christian
Duncan, James S.
Rueckert, Daniel
Bai, Wenjia
Arcucci, Rossella
contents The advent of large-scale vision foundation models, pre-trained on diverse natural images, has marked a paradigm shift in computer vision. However, how the frontier vision foundation models' efficacies transfer to specialised domains such as medical imaging remains an open question. This report investigates whether DINOv3, a state-of-the-art self-supervised vision transformer (ViT) pre-trained on natural images, can directly serve as a powerful, unified encoder for medical vision tasks without domain-specific fine-tuning. To answer this, we benchmark DINOv3 across common medical vision tasks, including 2D and 3D classification, segmentation, and registration on a wide range of medical imaging modalities. We systematically analyse its scalability by varying model sizes and input image resolutions. Our findings reveal that DINOv3 shows impressive performance and establishes a formidable new baseline. Remarkably, it can even outperform medical-specific foundation models like BiomedCLIP and CT-Net on several tasks, despite being trained solely on natural images. However, we identify clear limitations: The model's features degrade in scenarios requiring deep domain specialisation, such as in whole-slide images (WSIs), electron microscopy (EM), and positron emission tomography (PET). Furthermore, we observe that DINOv3 does not consistently follow the scaling law in the medical domain. Its performance does not reliably increase with larger models or finer feature resolutions, showing diverse scaling behaviours across tasks. Overall, our work establishes DINOv3 as a strong baseline, whose powerful visual features can serve as a robust prior for multiple medical tasks. This opens promising future directions, such as leveraging its features to enforce multiview consistency in 3D reconstruction.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06467
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does DINOv3 Set a New Medical Vision Standard? Benchmarking 2D and 3D Classification, Segmentation, and Registration
Liu, Che
Chen, Yinda
Shi, Haoyuan
Lu, Jinpeng
Jian, Bailiang
Pan, Jiazhen
Cai, Linghan
Wang, Jiayi
Yu, Jieming
Gao, Ziqi
Zhang, Xiaoran
Bai, Long
Zhang, Yundi
Li, Jun
Bercea, Cosmin I.
Ouyang, Cheng
Chen, Chen
Xiong, Zhiwei
Wiestler, Benedikt
Wachinger, Christian
Duncan, James S.
Rueckert, Daniel
Bai, Wenjia
Arcucci, Rossella
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The advent of large-scale vision foundation models, pre-trained on diverse natural images, has marked a paradigm shift in computer vision. However, how the frontier vision foundation models' efficacies transfer to specialised domains such as medical imaging remains an open question. This report investigates whether DINOv3, a state-of-the-art self-supervised vision transformer (ViT) pre-trained on natural images, can directly serve as a powerful, unified encoder for medical vision tasks without domain-specific fine-tuning. To answer this, we benchmark DINOv3 across common medical vision tasks, including 2D and 3D classification, segmentation, and registration on a wide range of medical imaging modalities. We systematically analyse its scalability by varying model sizes and input image resolutions. Our findings reveal that DINOv3 shows impressive performance and establishes a formidable new baseline. Remarkably, it can even outperform medical-specific foundation models like BiomedCLIP and CT-Net on several tasks, despite being trained solely on natural images. However, we identify clear limitations: The model's features degrade in scenarios requiring deep domain specialisation, such as in whole-slide images (WSIs), electron microscopy (EM), and positron emission tomography (PET). Furthermore, we observe that DINOv3 does not consistently follow the scaling law in the medical domain. Its performance does not reliably increase with larger models or finer feature resolutions, showing diverse scaling behaviours across tasks. Overall, our work establishes DINOv3 as a strong baseline, whose powerful visual features can serve as a robust prior for multiple medical tasks. This opens promising future directions, such as leveraging its features to enforce multiview consistency in 3D reconstruction.
title Does DINOv3 Set a New Medical Vision Standard? Benchmarking 2D and 3D Classification, Segmentation, and Registration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06467