Google has announced the launch of MedGemma, a new suite of open models designed to help developers build AI-based healthcare applications. The platform, built on Gemma 3, comes in two variants: a 4B multimodal version and a 27B text-only version, both of which users can fine-tune for specific healthcare applications.

The multimodal version serves as a foundation for applications classifying medical images across various specialties including radiology, digital pathology, skin images and fundus. Additionally, these models support applications for generating medical reports and answering questions about medical images.

For the text-only version, Google positions it as a starting point for applications requiring medical knowledge, such as patient interviewing, triage, summarization and clinical decision support. Google noted that this larger text-only version "will generally produce the best performance for most use cases."

"MedGemma is a developer model that requires validation on the developer's intended use case. Based on those validation results, the user will likely need to further adapt the model to improve performance," Google said in a statement. "MedGemma can be fine-tuned for improved performance on the existing tasks it's been trained on, or to add additional tasks to its repertoire."

This development aligns with the broader implementation of AI in medical imaging, which has significantly transformed healthcare according to a survey published in MDPI's journal Bioengineering (Basel).

"AI-based diagnostic tools not only speed up the interpretation of complex images but also improve early detection of disease, ultimately delivering better outcomes for patients. Additionally, AI-based image processing facilitates personalized treatment plans, thereby optimizing healthcare delivery," the survey's authors wrote.

"By combining cutting-edge AI techniques and their practical applications, it is clear that AI will continue shaping the future of healthcare in profound and positive ways."

Several digital health companies are already leveraging AI for medical imaging analysis, including imaging and care coordination company Viz.ai, AI-enabled imaging company Aidoc, and Lunit, which provides AI-powered solutions for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Med-tech outfit iCAD is another player in this space, having announced in 2022 a strategic agreement to incorporate Google Health's mammography AI technology into its breast-imaging tools.

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