Toward Global Large Language Models in Medicine

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02186v1
• Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:05:49 GMT
• Title: Toward Global Large Language Models in Medicine
• Authors: Rui Yang, Huitao Li, Weihao Xuan, Heli Qi, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Yingjian Chen, Rongrong Wang, Jacques Behmoaras, Tianxi Cai, Bibhas Chakraborty, Qingyu Chen, Lionel Tim-Ee Cheng, Marie-Louise Damwanza, Chido Dzinotyiwei, Aosong Feng, Chuan Hong, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yuhe Ke, Linah Kitala, Taehoon Ko, Jisan Lee, Irene Li, Jonathan Chong Kai Liew, Hongfang Liu, Lian Leng Low, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Yutaka Matsuo, Isheanesu Misi, Yilin Ning, Jasmine Chiat Ling Ong, Marcus Eng Hock Ong, Enrico Petretto, Hossein Rouhizadeh, Abiram Sandralegar, Oren Schreier, Iain Bee Huat Tan, Patrick Tan, Daniel Shu Wei Ting, Junjue Wang, Chunhua Weng, Matthew Yu Heng Wong, Fang Wu, Yunze Xiao, Xuhai Xu, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhuo Zheng, Yifan Peng, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu,
• Abstract summary: GlobMed is a large multilingual medical dataset containing over 500,000 entries spanning 12 languages, including four low-resource languages.<n>GlobMed-Bench assesses 56 state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs across multiple multilingual medical tasks, revealing significant performance disparities across languages.<n>GlobMed-LLMs achieved an average performance improvement of over 40% relative to baseline models, with a more than threefold increase in performance on low-resource languages.
• Score: 67.38063166560406
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Despite continuous advances in medical technology, the global distribution of health care resources remains uneven. The development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of medicine and holds promise for improving health care quality and expanding access to medical information globally. However, existing LLMs are primarily trained on high-resource languages, limiting their applicability in global medical scenarios. To address this gap, we constructed GlobMed, a large multilingual medical dataset, containing over 500,000 entries spanning 12 languages, including four low-resource languages. Building on this, we established GlobMed-Bench, which systematically assesses 56 state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs across multiple multilingual medical tasks, revealing significant performance disparities across languages, particularly for low-resource languages. Additionally, we introduced GlobMed-LLMs, a suite of multilingual medical LLMs trained on GlobMed, with parameters ranging from 1.7B to 8B. GlobMed-LLMs achieved an average performance improvement of over 40% relative to baseline models, with a more than threefold increase in performance on low-resource languages. Together, these resources provide an important foundation for advancing the equitable development and application of LLMs globally, enabling broader language communities to benefit from technological advances.

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