Do Medical Vision Models Reason About Anatomy? Probing the Spatial Inductive Biases of Learned Visual Representations

The paper introduces SPAR‑Bench, a set of eight probes designed to test whether medical vision models can reason about anatomy in abdominal CT scans. Experiments across five architectures and three foundation models—both frozen and fine‑tuned—show that while models can recall canonical organ locations, they fail to perform relational reasoning or spatial comparisons within a patient, even under zero‑shot transfer. The study also demonstrates that pooled probing underestimates a model’s relational capabilities and that open‑weight multimodal large language models perform poorly on these tasks.

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• fine-tuning
• multimodal