MRI-CORE: A Foundation Model for Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract: The widespread use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and the rise of deep learning have enabled the development of powerful predictive models for a wide range of diagnostic tasks in MRI, such as image classification or object segmentation. However, training models for specific new tasks often requires large amounts of labeled data, which is difficult to obtain due to high annotation costs and data privacy concerns. To circumvent this issue, we introduce MRI-CORE (MRI COmprehensive Representation Encoder), a vision foundation model pre-trained using more than 6 million slices from over 110,000 MRI volumes across 18 main body locations. Experiments on five diverse object segmentation tasks in MRI demonstrate that MRI-CORE can significantly improve segmentation performance in realistic scenarios with limited labeled data availability, achieving an average gain of 6.97% 3D Dice Coefficient using only 10 annotated slices per task. We further demonstrate new model capabilities in MRI such as classification of image properties including body location, sequence type and institution, and zero-shot segmentation. These results highlight the value of MRI-CORE as a generalist vision foundation model for MRI, potentially lowering the data annotation resource barriers for many applications.