Google has released MedGemma 1.5, an updated version of its open healthcare-focused AI model. The company said the model expands support for CT scans, MRI and histopathology, and also introduced MedASR, a medical speech-to-text system for clinical dictation and healthcare workflows.
Both models are available via the AI community Hugging Face and Google Cloud’s AI development platform Vertex AI.
MedGemma 1.5 4B is part of Google’s Health AI Developer Foundations programme and is available for research and commercial use.
“We are updating our open MedGemma model with improved medical imaging support,” said Google in a blog post. “We also describe MedASR, our new open medical speech-to-text model.”
According to Google, MedGemma 1.5 improved baseline accuracy by 3% on disease classification tasks using CT scans and by 14% on MRI-based classification compared with the previous version. The company also reported gains in anatomical localisation in chest X-rays and structured data extraction from laboratory reports.
The 4B-parameter model is designed to be compute-efficient and capable of running offline, while a larger 27B-parameter version remains available for text-heavy medical applications. MedGemma models can be deployed on Google Cloud through Vertex AI, the company said.
Google also announced MedASR, an open automated speech recognition model fine-tuned for medical dictation. In internal tests, MedASR recorded a 5.2% word error rate on chest X-ray dictations, compared with 12.5% for a general-purpose speech recognition model.
“While text is currently the primary interface for large language models, verbal communication remains crucial in many aspects of healthcare, including medical dictation and live conversations between patients and providers,” the company said.
Google also announced the MedGemma Impact Challenge, a hackathon hosted on the data science and machine learning platform Kaggle, with $100,000 in prizes to encourage developers to build healthcare applications using the models.
The company said MedGemma is intended as a developer foundation model and should be validated and adapted before use in clinical settings. The launch comes amid intensifying competition in healthcare AI. OpenAI recently introduced ChatGPT Health, while Anthropic has rolled out Claude for Healthcare, pushing generative AI deeper into medical workflows.
