A4-MR: Abnormality-aware Anatomical Alignment for MR

Noel D'souza, Zhijian Yang, Nishank Singla, Pranay Doshi, Krisztian Koos +12

Recent advances in large-scale foundation models have enabled strong generalization across a wide range of clinical and research tasks in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, existing vision-language MRI models remain limited in anatomy-specific localization and pathology-aware representation, particularly in real-world settings. We introduce A4-MR, a 3D vision-language foundation model trained on approximately 50,000 MRI studies comprising 491,000 series, roughly half of which are paired with radiology reports. A4-MR is designed to: (1) learn anatomy localization through large-scale pretraining with noisy labels; (2) align image and text representations at the anatomical level; and (3) learn distinct representations of healthy and abnormal anatomy. Across a diverse set of downstream tasks, A4-MR outperforms existing foundation models, including a +1.7 AUROC improvement over MedSigLIP for abnormality detection. Using a frozen encoder, A4-MR also surpasses an end-to-end task-specific MedNeXt model for knee segmentation by +1.4 Dice and performs comparably to the best task-specific model for abdominal organ segmentation on AMOS, within 0.4 Dice. Finally, without anatomical…