Health AI Central
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Nat Biomed Eng2026August 17, 2026Journal Article

An explainable biomedical foundation model via large-scale concept-enhanced vision-language pretraining.

Yuxiang Nie1, Sunan He1, Yequan Bie1, Yihui Wang1, Zhixuan Chen1, Shu Yang1, Zhiyuan Cai1, Linshan Wu1, Hongmei Wang1, Xi Wang1, Ngai Shing Cheng1, Luyang Luo2, Mingxiang Wu3, Haibo Jin1, Xian Wu4, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan5,6, Yuk Ming Lau7, Zhengyu Zhang8,9,10, Sushan Xiao11, Can Yang12, Yinghua Zhao13, Xiaohui Duan14, Li Zhang11, Li Liang8,9,10, Yefeng Zheng15, Pranav Rajpurkar2, Hao Chen16,17,18,19,20
1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
2Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA.
3Department of Radiology, Shenzhen People's Hospital, Shenzhen, China.
4Jarvis Research Center, Tencent YouTu Lab, Shenzhen, China.
5Department of Anatomical and Cellular Pathology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
6State Key Laboratory of Translational Oncology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
7Division of Dermatology, Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong, China.
8Department of Pathology, Nanfang Hospital and School of Basic Medical Sciences, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
9Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Molecular Tumor Pathology, Guangzhou, China.
10Jinfeng Laboratory, Chongqing, China.
11Department of Ultrasound Medicine, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
12Department of Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
13Third Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University (Academy of Orthopedics, Guangdong Province), Guangzhou, China.
14Department of Radiology, Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
15Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China.
16Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. jhc@ust.hk.
17Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. jhc@ust.hk.
18Division of Life Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. jhc@ust.hk.
19HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute, Shenzhen, China. jhc@ust.hk.
20State Key Laboratory of Nervous System Disorders, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. jhc@ust.hk.
PubMed DOI

Abstract

Artificial intelligence for medical imaging is required to be accurate and interpretable to clinicians. However, current multimodal biomedical foundation models often prioritize performance over explainability. Here we present ConceptCLIP, an explainable biomedical foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art diagnostic accuracy while delivering human-interpretable explanations across diverse i…

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