Large Language Model for Medical Images: A Survey of Taxonomy, Systematic Review, and Future Trends

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the medical image domain, as they can generalize to multiple tasks and offer outstanding performance. While LLMs achieve promising results, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive summary of medical images, making it challenging for researchers to understand the progress within this domain. To fill this gap, we make the first attempt to present a comprehensive survey for LLM on medical images. In addition, to better summarize the current progress comprehensively, we further introduce a novel x-stage tuning paradigm for summarization, including zero-stage tuning, one-stage tuning, and multi-stage tuning, offering a unified perspective on LLMs for medical images. Finally, we discuss challenges and future directions in this domain, aiming to spur more breakthroughs in the future. We hope this work can pave the way for the broad application of LLMs in medical images and provide a valuable resource for this domain.