The widespread use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in combination with deep learning shows promise for many high-impact automated diagnostic and prognostic tools. However, training new models requires large amounts of labeled data, a challenge due to high cost of precise annotations and data privacy. To address this issue, we introduce the MRI-CORE, a vision foundation model trained using more than 6 million slices from over 110 thousand MRI volumes across 18 body locations. Our experiments show notable improvements in performance over state-of-the-art methods in 13 data-restricted segmentation tasks, as well as in image classification, and zero-shot segmentation, showing the strong potential of MRI-CORE to enable data-efficient development of artificial intelligence models. We also present data on which strategies yield most useful foundation models and a novel analysis relating similarity between pre-training and downstream task data with transfer learning performance. Our model is publicly available with a permissive license.
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