Medical image classification is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, benefiting significantly from advancements in artificial intelligence. The paper reviews recent progress in the field, focusing on three levels of solutions: basic, specific, and applied. It highlights advances in traditional methods using deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers, as well as state-of-the-art approaches with Vision Language Models. These models tackle the issue of limited labeled data, and enhance and explain predictive results through Explainable Artificial Intelligence.