M3Retrieve: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Medicine
Authors: name: Arkadeep Acharya, name: Akash Ghosh, name: Pradeepika Verma, name: Kitsuchart Pasupa, name: Sriparna Saha, name: Priti Singh
Organization: IIT Patna

With the increasing use of RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG), strong
retrieval models have become more important than ever. In healthcare,
multimodal retrieval models that combine information from both text and images
offer major advantages for many downstream tasks such as question answering,
cross-modal retrieval, and multimodal summarization, since medical data often
includes both formats. However, there is currently no standard benchmark to
evaluate how well these models perform in medical settings. To address this
gap, we introduce M3Retrieve, a Multimodal Medical Retrieval Benchmark.
M3Retrieve, spans 5 domains,16 medical fields, and 4 distinct tasks, with over
1.2 Million text documents and 164K multimodal queries, all collected under
approved licenses. We evaluate leading multimodal retrieval models on this
benchmark to explore the challenges specific to different medical specialities
and to understand their impact on retrieval performance. By releasing
M3Retrieve, we aim to enable systematic evaluation, foster model innovation,
and accelerate research toward building more capable and reliable multimodal
retrieval systems for medical applications. The dataset and the baselines code
are available in this github page https://github.com/AkashGhosh/M3Retrieve.