MedFoundationHub: a lightweight and secure toolkit for deploying medical vision language foundation models

Abstract

Recent advances in medical vision-language models (VLMs) open up remarkable opportunities for clinical applications such as automated report generation, physician copilots, and uncertainty quantification. Despite their promise, medical VLMs raise serious security concerns. These include the risk of Protected Health Information (PHI) exposure, data leakage, and vulnerability to cyberthreats, concerns that are especially critical in hospital environments. Even when adopted for research or non-clinical purposes, healthcare organizations must exercise caution and implement safeguards. To address these challenges, we present MedFoundationHub, a graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit that: (1) enables physicians to manually select and use different models without programming expertise, (2) supports engineers in efficiently deploying medical VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion, with seamless integration of Hugging Face open-source models, and (3) ensures privacy-preserving inference through Docker-orchestrated, operating system agnostic deployment. MedFoundationHub requires only an offline local workstation equipped with a single NVIDIA A6000 GPU, making it both secure and accessible within the typical resources of academic research labs. To evaluate current capabilities, we engaged board-certified pathologists to deploy and assess five state-of-the-art VLMs (Google-MedGemma3-4B, Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, and LLaVA-1.5-7B/13B). Expert evaluation covered colon cases and renal cases, yielding 1,015 clinician–model scoring events. These assessments revealed recurring limitations, including off-target answers, vague reasoning, and inconsistent pathology terminology.

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