@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-solve,
title = "Solve the Missing First Step: Can {VLM}s Standardize Raw Heterogeneous Medical Data?",
author = "Chen, Xin and
Xu, Dongliang and
Zhu, Cunhao and
Luo, Xudong and
Lyu, Haoyang and
Sun, Xiaoxiao and
Yeung-Levy, Serena and
Yao, Yue",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1001/",
pages = "23041--23059",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to medical AI, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating their diagnostic ability over given medical images and texts, implicitly assuming that standardized medical images, texts, or question{--}answer pairs are already prepared. However, this assumption does not hold when we apply VLMs in real clinical practice, where medical data is often raw, heterogeneous, and fragmented across different sources. In this paper, we study this missing step, i.e., raw medical data standardization. Specifically, models are given raw dataset folders and evaluated on their ability to identify source formats, convert raw medical images into VLM-compatible visual inputs, extract relevant textual information, and organize the results into structured image-text pairs. To construct this Medical Data Standardization Benchmark (MDS-Bench), we manually annotate 1,939 raw medical data standardization tasks covering diverse clinical practice, radiology modalities, annotation formats, and directory layouts. Extensive experiments show that even the best performing VLM, i.e., Gemini 3 Flash, achieves only a 48.6{\%} end-to-end success rate. Our research highlights raw medical data standardization as a critical bottleneck for medical AI diagnosis in real practice."
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<abstract>As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to medical AI, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating their diagnostic ability over given medical images and texts, implicitly assuming that standardized medical images, texts, or question–answer pairs are already prepared. However, this assumption does not hold when we apply VLMs in real clinical practice, where medical data is often raw, heterogeneous, and fragmented across different sources. In this paper, we study this missing step, i.e., raw medical data standardization. Specifically, models are given raw dataset folders and evaluated on their ability to identify source formats, convert raw medical images into VLM-compatible visual inputs, extract relevant textual information, and organize the results into structured image-text pairs. To construct this Medical Data Standardization Benchmark (MDS-Bench), we manually annotate 1,939 raw medical data standardization tasks covering diverse clinical practice, radiology modalities, annotation formats, and directory layouts. Extensive experiments show that even the best performing VLM, i.e., Gemini 3 Flash, achieves only a 48.6% end-to-end success rate. Our research highlights raw medical data standardization as a critical bottleneck for medical AI diagnosis in real practice.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Solve the Missing First Step: Can VLMs Standardize Raw Heterogeneous Medical Data?
%A Chen, Xin
%A Xu, Dongliang
%A Zhu, Cunhao
%A Luo, Xudong
%A Lyu, Haoyang
%A Sun, Xiaoxiao
%A Yeung-Levy, Serena
%A Yao, Yue
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F chen-etal-2026-solve
%X As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to medical AI, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating their diagnostic ability over given medical images and texts, implicitly assuming that standardized medical images, texts, or question–answer pairs are already prepared. However, this assumption does not hold when we apply VLMs in real clinical practice, where medical data is often raw, heterogeneous, and fragmented across different sources. In this paper, we study this missing step, i.e., raw medical data standardization. Specifically, models are given raw dataset folders and evaluated on their ability to identify source formats, convert raw medical images into VLM-compatible visual inputs, extract relevant textual information, and organize the results into structured image-text pairs. To construct this Medical Data Standardization Benchmark (MDS-Bench), we manually annotate 1,939 raw medical data standardization tasks covering diverse clinical practice, radiology modalities, annotation formats, and directory layouts. Extensive experiments show that even the best performing VLM, i.e., Gemini 3 Flash, achieves only a 48.6% end-to-end success rate. Our research highlights raw medical data standardization as a critical bottleneck for medical AI diagnosis in real practice.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1001/
%P 23041-23059
Markdown (Informal)
[Solve the Missing First Step: Can VLMs Standardize Raw Heterogeneous Medical Data?](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1001/) (Chen et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Xin Chen, Dongliang Xu, Cunhao Zhu, Xudong Luo, Haoyang Lyu, Xiaoxiao Sun, Serena Yeung-Levy, and Yue Yao. 2026. Solve the Missing First Step: Can VLMs Standardize Raw Heterogeneous Medical Data?. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 23041–23059, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.