BIOMEDICA: An Open Biomedical Image-Caption Archive, Dataset, and Vision-Language Models Derived from Scientific Literature

Understand

The development of vision-language models (VLMs) is driven by large-scale and diverse multimodal datasets.

• However, progress toward generalist biomedical VLMs is limited by the lack of annotated, publicly accessible datasets across biology and medicine.
• Existing efforts are restricted to narrow domains, missing the full diversity of biomedical knowledge encoded in scientific literature.
• To address this gap, we introduce BIOMEDICA, a scalable, open-source framework to extract, annotate, and serialize the entirety of the PubMed Central Open Access subset into an easy-to-use, publicly accessible dataset.