ArticleAesthetic surgery journal. Open forum2026
Evaluation of Aesthetic Outcomes Following Botulinum Toxin Treatment Using Multimodal Large Language Models: A Paired Before-and-After Analysis.
Article in Aesthetic surgery journal. Open forum, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Background: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly applied to visual assessment tasks, yet their ability to evaluate aesthetic treatment outcomes remains unclear. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess whether contemporary MLLMs can identify treatment state and detect region-specific aesthetic improvement following botulinum neurotoxin treatment. Methods: In this observational study, 23 paired facial image cases (46 images; 460 model evaluations) were analyzed. Four MLLMs (GPT-5.4 Pro [OpenAI, San Francisco, CA], Grok 4.1 [xAI, San Francisco, CA], Gemini 3.1 Pro [Google DeepMind, Mountain View, CA], and Claude Opus 4.6 [Anthropic, San Francisco, CA]) performed 5 independent inference runs per case. Models identified the posttreatment image and assessed regional improvement (forehead, glabella, and periorbital). Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, balanced accuracy, Matthews correlation coefficient, and Fleiss' Results: All models identified the posttreatment image (100% accuracy). Region-specific improvement detection frequently failed to exceed majority-class baselines (65.2%-91.3%). Gemini 3.1 Pro showed the highest performance for the forehead (74.8%) and glabella (63.5%), whereas no model reached the periorbital baseline. Inter-run reliability varied widely ( Conclusions: MLLMs recognize the format of aesthetic change but not its clinical nuance. Bridging this gap requires more than improved accuracy: a coordinated agenda of domain-specific fine-tuning, expert-rater benchmarking, and structured outcome frameworks, supported by governance of training-data provenance and clear safeguards before any clinical or research deployment. Level of Evidence 5 Therapeutic: For image description, please refer to the figure legend and surrounding text.
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