Key concept learning for medical vision language model with reasoning capabilities

Training medical vision-language models (VLMs) typically demands millions of image-text pairs to achieve versatility and reasoning, posing significant challenges in data acquisition. We propose ConceptVLM, a novel data-efficient fine-tuning paradigm that transforms general-domain VLMs into specialized medical ones with minimal labeled data, integrating medical knowledge without disrupting the model's existing general capabilities. Central to our approach is a key concept-aware training strategy, building a structured medical concept dictionary and employing masked attention to guide the model's focus toward essential clinical concepts. This focused fine-tuning enhances domain-specific comprehension while preserving the model's reasoning abilities and response diversity. Experiments across multimodal medical benchmarks show ConceptVLM achieves state-of-the-art results using only 1% of the original training data, outperforming traditional methods reliant on large-scale QA datasets. These findings challenge the prevailing reliance on extensive annotated corpora, demonstrating key concept-guided tuning as a viable path to developing cognitively capable medical VLMs.