A Pan-Organ Vision-Language Model for Generalizable 3D CT Representations

Generalizable foundation models for computed tomographic (CT) medical imaging data are emerging AI tools anticipated to vastly improve clinical workflow efficiency. However, existing models are typically trained within narrow imaging contexts, including limited anatomical coverage, contrast settings, and clinical indications. These constraints reduce their ability to generalize across the broad spectrum of real-world presentations encountered in volumetric CT imaging data. We introduce Percival, a vision-language foundation model trained on over 400,000 CT volumes and paired radiology reports from more than 50,000 participants enrolled in the Penn Medicine BioBank. Percival employs a dual-encoder architecture with a transformer-based image encoder and a BERT-style language encoder, aligned via symmetric contrastive learning. Percival was validated on over 20,000 participants imaging data encompassing over 100,000 CT volumes. In image-text recall tasks, Percival outperforms models trained on limited anatomical windows. To assess Percival’s clinical knowledge, we evaluated the biologic, phenotypic and prognostic relevance using laboratory-wide, phenome-wide association studies and survival analyses, uncovering a rich latent structure aligned with physiological measurements and disease phenotypes.