Health system learning achieves generalist neuroimaging models

TL;DR

This paper introduces NeuroVFM, a high-performance neuroimaging model trained on routine clinical data, demonstrating superior diagnostic capabilities and safety features compared to frontier AI models, thus establishing health system learning as a new paradigm.

Contribution

The paper presents NeuroVFM, a novel scalable model trained on uncurated clinical neuroimaging data, achieving state-of-the-art results and safer clinical decision support.

Findings

NeuroVFM outperforms existing models in clinical tasks.

The model exhibits emergent neuroanatomic understanding.

NeuroVFM reduces hallucinations and errors in reports.

Abstract

Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as OpenAI's GPT-5 and Meta's DINOv3, have advanced rapidly through training on internet-scale public data, yet such systems lack access to private clinical data. Neuroimaging, in particular, is underrepresented in the public domain due to identifiable facial features within MRI and CT scans, fundamentally restricting model performance in clinical medicine. Here, we show that frontier models underperform on neuroimaging tasks and that learning directly from uncurated data generated during routine clinical care at health systems, a paradigm we call health system learning, yields high-performance, generalist neuroimaging models. We introduce NeuroVFM, a visual foundation model trained on 5.24 million clinical MRI and CT volumes using a scalable volumetric joint-embedding predictive architecture. NeuroVFM learns comprehensive representations of brain anatomy and pathology, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple clinical tasks, including radiologic diagnosis and report generation. The model exhibits emergent neuroanatomic understanding and interpretable visual grounding of diagnostic findings. When paired with open-source language models through lightweight visual instruction tuning, NeuroVFM generates radiology reports that surpass frontier models in accuracy, clinical triage, and expert preference. Through clinically grounded visual understanding, NeuroVFM reduces hallucinated findings and critical errors, offering safer clinical decision support. These results establish health system learning as a paradigm for building generalist medical AI and provide a scalable framework for clinical foundation models.