WorldMedQA-V: a multilingual, multimodal medical examination dataset for multimodal language models evaluation
João Matos, Shan Chen, Siena Kathleen V. Placino, Yingya Li, Juan Carlos Climent Pardo, Daphna Idan, Takeshi Tohyama, David Restrepo
Abstract
Multimodal/vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly being deployed in healthcare settings worldwide, necessitating robust benchmarks to ensure their safety, efficacy, and fairness. Multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets derived from national medical examinations have long served as valuable evaluation tools, but existing datasets are largely text-only and available in a limited subset of languages and countries. To address these challenges, we present WorldMedQA-V, an updated multilingual, multimodal benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate VLMs in healthcare. WorldMedQA-V includes 568 labeled multiple-choice QAs paired with 568 medical images from four countries (Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Spain), covering original languages and validated English translations by native clinicians, respectively. Baseline performance for common open- and closed-source models are provided in the local language and English translations, and with and without images provided to the model. The WorldMedQA-V benchmark aims to better match AI systems to the diverse healthcare environments in which they are deployed, fostering more equitable, effective, and representative applications.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{matos-etal-2025-worldmedqa,
title = "{W}orld{M}ed{QA}-{V}: a multilingual, multimodal medical examination dataset for multimodal language models evaluation",
author = "Matos, Jo{\~a}o and
Chen, Shan and
Placino, Siena Kathleen V. and
Li, Yingya and
Pardo, Juan Carlos Climent and
Idan, Daphna and
Tohyama, Takeshi and
Restrepo, David and
Nakayama, Luis Filipe and
Pascual-Leone, Jos{\'e} Mar{\'i}a Millet and
Savova, Guergana K and
Aerts, Hugo and
Celi, Leo Anthony and
Wong, An-Kwok Ian and
Bitterman, Danielle and
Gallifant, Jack",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.402/",
pages = "7203--7216",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7"
}