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MEDSYN: Benchmarking Multi-EviDence SYNthesis in Complex Clinical Cases for Multimodal Large Language Models

Boqi Chen, Xudong Liu, Jiachuan Peng, Marianne Frey-Marti, Bang Zheng, Kyle Lam, Lin Li, Jianing Qiu · Feb 25, 2026 · Citations: 0

How to use this paper page

Coverage: Stale

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Metadata: Stale

Trust level

Moderate

Signals: Stale

What still needs checking

No major weakness surfaced.

Signal confidence: 0.70

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity. We introduce MEDSYN, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark of highly complex clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence (CE) types per case. Mirroring clinical workflow, we evaluate 18 MLLMs on differential diagnosis (DDx) generation and final diagnosis (FDx) selection. While top models often match or even outperform human experts on DDx generation, all MLLMs exhibit a much larger DDx--FDx performance gap compared to expert clinicians, indicating a failure mode in synthesis of heterogeneous CE types. Ablations attribute this failure to (i) overreliance on less discriminative textual CE ($\it{e.g.}$, medical history) and (ii) a cross-modal CE utilization gap. We introduce Evidence Sensitivity to quantify the latter and show that a smaller gap correlates with higher diagnostic accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate how it can be used to guide interventions to improve model performance. We will open-source our benchmark and code.

HFEPX Relevance Assessment

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Eval-Fit Score

65/100 • Medium

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Detected

HFEPX Fit

Moderate-confidence candidate

Extraction confidence: Moderate

What This Page Found In The Paper

Each field below shows whether the signal looked explicit, partial, or missing in the available metadata. Use this to judge what is safe to trust directly and what still needs full-paper validation.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Expert Verification

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Directly usable for protocol triage.

Evidence snippet: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Includes extracted eval setup.

Evidence snippet: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit QC controls found.

Evidence snippet: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

Confidence: Low Not found

No benchmark anchors detected.

Evidence snippet: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.

Reported Metrics

strong

Accuracy

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Evidence snippet: We introduce Evidence Sensitivity to quantify the latter and show that a smaller gap correlates with higher diagnostic accuracy.

Rater Population

strong

Domain Experts

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Helpful for staffing comparability.

Evidence snippet: While top models often match or even outperform human experts on DDx generation, all MLLMs exhibit a much larger DDx--FDx performance gap compared to expert clinicians, indicating a failure mode in synthesis of heterogeneous CE types.

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Expert Verification
  • Rater population: Domain Experts
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: Medicine, Coding, Multilingual
  • Signal basis: Structured extraction plus abstract evidence.

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Signal confidence: 0.70
  • Known cautions: None surfaced in extraction.

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracy

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.
  • We introduce MEDSYN, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark of highly complex clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence (CE) types per case.
  • Mirroring clinical workflow, we evaluate 18 MLLMs on differential diagnosis (DDx) generation and final diagnosis (FDx) selection.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • We introduce MEDSYN, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark of highly complex clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence (CE) types per case.
  • Mirroring clinical workflow, we evaluate 18 MLLMs on differential diagnosis (DDx) generation and final diagnosis (FDx) selection.
  • We introduce Evidence Sensitivity to quantify the latter and show that a smaller gap correlates with higher diagnostic accuracy.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in medical applications, yet existing benchmarks inadequately capture real-world clinical complexity.
  • We introduce MEDSYN, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark of highly complex clinical cases with up to 7 distinct visual clinical evidence (CE) types per case.

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Expert Verification

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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