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Synthetic data boosts medical foundation models

Using synthetic data generated via conditioning with disease labels can enhance the pretraining efficiency and generalization of medical foundation models, as shown for the detection of eye diseases via fundus photographs.

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Fig. 1: A data-efficient framework for developing medical foundation models through synthetic-data generation, self-supervised pretraining and supervised fine-tuning.

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Correspondence to Tien Yin Wong.

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Sheng, B., Keane, P.A., Tham, YC. et al. Synthetic data boosts medical foundation models. Nat. Biomed. Eng 9, 443–444 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-025-01375-y

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