Model Medicine: A Clinical Framework for Understanding, Diagnosing, and Treating AI Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces Model Medicine, a comprehensive clinical framework for understanding, diagnosing, and treating AI models by drawing parallels with biological medicine, including new diagnostic tools, frameworks, and a taxonomy of subdisciplines.

Contribution

It presents a novel interdisciplinary research program that bridges AI interpretability with clinical practices, including a behavioral genetics framework, diagnostic tools, and a taxonomy of subfields.

Findings

Empirically grounded Four Shell Model explains model behavior.

Open-source Neural MRI diagnostic tool validated in clinical cases.

Proposed layered architecture and therapeutic framework for AI model treatment.

Abstract

Model Medicine is the science of understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing disorders in AI models, grounded in the principle that AI models -- like biological organisms -- have internal structures, dynamic processes, heritable traits, observable symptoms, classifiable conditions, and treatable states. This paper introduces Model Medicine as a research program, bridging the gap between current AI interpretability research (anatomical observation) and the systematic clinical practice that complex AI systems increasingly require. We present five contributions: (1) a discipline taxonomy organizing 15 subdisciplines across four divisions -- Basic Model Sciences, Clinical Model Sciences, Model Public Health, and Model Architectural Medicine; (2) the Four Shell Model (v3.3), a behavioral genetics framework empirically grounded in 720 agents and 24,923 decisions from the Agora-12 program, explaining how model behavior emerges from Core--Shell interaction; (3) Neural MRI (Model Resonance Imaging), a working open-source diagnostic tool mapping five medical neuroimaging modalities to AI interpretability techniques, validated through four clinical cases demonstrating imaging, comparison, localization, and predictive capability; (4) a five-layer diagnostic framework for comprehensive model assessment; and (5) clinical model sciences including the Model Temperament Index for behavioral profiling, Model Semiology for symptom description, and M-CARE for standardized case reporting. We additionally propose the Layered Core Hypothesis -- a biologically-inspired three-layer parameter architecture -- and a therapeutic framework connecting diagnosis to treatment.