Med-RADIO: Reducing All Medical Domains Into One via Multi-Teacher Distillation

Chu Zhang, Haoyu Jiang, Hongyuan Zhang, Hongbin Liu, Dong Yi

The rapid expansion of large-scale medical datasets and computational resources has driven significant progress in medical foundation models. Given the inherent heterogeneity of medical imaging modalities, current research mainly follows two paths: specialized models optimized for specific modalities, and generalist models designed to handle multiple modalities. However, medical generalist models suffer from both insufficient training data scale relative to natural image generalists and inadequate domain-specific depth relative to medical specialists. Empirically, generalist models establish a cross-modality performance baseline, while specialists define the performance ceiling within their respective domains. To elevate this baseline toward these ceilings, we propose Med-RADIO, a medical multi-teacher distillation framework that Reduces All Domains Into One by compressing complementary expertise from multiple domain-specific teachers into a unified medical vision foundation model. Our method curates both generalist and specialist teachers, allocates modality-aligned distillation streams to reorganize generalist pretraining data so it matches specialist domains, and uses a…