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EchoAtlas: A Conversational, Multi-View Vision-Language Foundation Model for Echocardiography Interpretation and Clinical Reasoning

Chao, C.-J.; Asadi, M.; Li, L.; Ramasamy, G.; Pecco, N.; Wang, Y.-C.; Poterucha, T.; Arsanjani, R.; Kane, G. C.; Oh, J. K.; Banerjee, I.; Langlotz, C. P.; Fei-Fei, L.; Adeli, E.; Erickson, B. J.

2026-03-17 cardiovascular medicine
10.64898/2026.03.14.26348388 medRxiv
Show abstract

Echocardiography is the most widely used cardiac imaging modality, yet artificial intelligence-enabled interpretation remains limited by the inability of existing models to integrate visual assessment, quantitative measurement, and clinical reasoning within a unified framework. Here we present EchoAtlas, the first autoregressive vision-language model developed for echocardiographic interpretation. Trained on over 12.9 million question-answer pairs derived from approximately 2 million echocardiogram videos, EchoAtlas achieves 0.966 accuracy on multiple-choice questions in our internal test set and establishes a new state-of-the-art on the public MIMIC-EchoQA benchmark (0.699 vs. 0.508 previously). EchoAtlas also provides accurate quantitative measurements, segment-level regional wall motion assessment, longitudinal comparison, and diagnostic reasoning across diverse question formats -- capabilities not previously demonstrated in this domain. These results highlight the potential of autoregressive vision-language models as a foundation for interactive echocardiographic interpretation, representing an early step toward scalable, auditable artificial intelligence systems in cardiology practice.

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