Do Medical Foundation Models Generalize on the African Brain?
Medical foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used for brain MRI analysis. However, their evaluation remains dominated by high-resource datasets, leaving generalization to African cohorts underexplored. We assess whether FMs generalize equally to African and non-African brain MRI data across two tasks: dementia classification using a Nigerian dataset and brain tumor segmentation using BraTS-Africa. We evaluate two generalist FMs (BrainIAC, 3DINO) and two segmentation-specific FMs (MedSAM2, Medical-SAM2) against a from-scratch baseline. For classification, FMs provide limited gains (highest ROC-AUC of 0.86 with BrainIAC), whereas for segmentation they consistently improve performance, r...
| Authors | Kaouther Mouheb, Gonzalo Esteban Mosquera Rojas, Juancito van Leeuwen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 30 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 July 2026 |
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