A Large-Scale Vision-Language Dataset Derived from Open Scientific Literature to Advance Biomedical Generalist AI
Alejandro Lozano, Min Woo Sun, James Burgess, Jeffrey J. Nirschl, Christopher Polzak, Yuhui Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Jeffrey Gu, Ivan Lopez, Josiah Aklilu, Anita Rau, Austin Wolfgang Katzer, Collin Chiu, Orr Zohar, Xiaohan Wang, Alfred Seunghoon Song, Chiang Chia-Chun, Robert Tibshirani, Serena Yeung-Levy
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Despite the excitement behind biomedical artificial intelligence (AI), access to high-quality, diverse, and large-scale data - the foundation for modern AI systems - is still a bottleneck to unlocking its full potential. To address this gap, we introduce Biomedica, an open-source dataset derived from the PubMed Central Open Access subset, containing over 6 million scientific articles and 24 million image-text pairs, along with 27 metadata fields (including expert human annotations). To overcome the challenges of accessing our large-scale dataset, we provide scalable streaming and search APIs through a web server, facilitating seamless integration with AI systems. We demonstrate the utility of the Biomedica dataset by building embedding models, chat-style models, and retrieval-augmented chat agents. Notably, all our AI models surpass previous open systems in their respective categories, underscoring the critical role of diverse, high-quality, and large-scale biomedical data.