MMIR-TCM: Memory-Integrated Multimodal Inference and Retrieval for TCM Clinical Decision Support

Lihui Luo, Joongwon Chae, Ziyan Chen, Yang Liu, Siyi Cheng, Weihan Gao, Zelin Zeng, Xiaoming Yin, Samaneh Beheshti Kashi, Dongmei Yu, Lian Zhang, Jing Sui, Zeming Liang, Jiansong Ji, Peter E. Lobie, Peiwu Qin

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnosis, particularly through tongue inspection, faces persistent challenges in subjectivity and reproducibility. The application of multimodal artificial intelligence to TCM clinical tasks, such as syndrome differentiation and prescription generation, is significantly hampered by the semantic gap between visual tongue features and textual reasoning, as well as the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIR-TCM, a novel framework that emulates the diagnostic process of TCM experts by integrating multimodal large language model(MLLM) with memory-augmented segmentation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Employing a three-stage architecture, MMIR-TCM integrates a training-free Memory-SAM module for robust tongue extraction, a fine-tuned Qwen3-VL model for structured tongue diagnosis generation, and a Qwen3-based RAG component for evidence-grounded clinical decision support generation. The framework was developed and validated using MedTCM, a new large-scale multimodal dataset that we introduce specifically for advanced TCM research. To properly evaluate our framework's clinical accuracy, which existing metrics fail to capture, we also developed TDEU, a domain-specific evaluation metric incorporating semantic understanding and diagnostic importance. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMIR-TCM significantly outperforms leading models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Flash.