Multi-Modal Understanding and Generation for Medical Images and Text via Vision-Language Pre-Training.

Recently a number of studies demonstrated impressive performance on diverse vision-language multi-modal tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering by extending the BERT architecture with multi-modal pre-training objectives. In this work we explore a broad set of multi-modal representation learning tasks in the medical domain, specifically using radiology images and the unstructured report. We propose Medical Vision Language Learner (MedViLL), which adopts a BERT-based architecture combined with a novel multi-modal attention masking scheme to maximize generalization performance for both vision-language understanding tasks (diagnosis classification, medical image-report retrieval, medical visual question answering) and vision-language generation task (radiology report generation). By statistically and rigorously evaluating the proposed model on four downstream tasks with three radiographic image-report datasets (MIMIC-CXR, Open-I, and VQA-RAD), we empirically demonstrate the superior downstream task performance of MedViLL against various baselines, including task-specific architectures.

Lifetime urban/rural residence, social support and late-life depression in Korea.

BACKGROUND: Population ageing and rural-urban migration are accelerating in many non-Western nations. This study aimed to investigate: (i) the association between lifetime urban/rural residence and late-life depression in Korea and (ii) modification of associations between depression and social support by lifetime residence. METHODS: 1204 urban/rural residents aged 65+were interviewed and GMS-AGECAT diagnoses made. Previous areas of residence were recorded and social support deficits quantified. RESULTS: Depression was present in 9% and 21% of the rural and urban samples respectively. For the urban sample, depression was not associated with earlier urban/rural residence. Social support deficits were most strongly associated with depression in people with a lifetime rural residence, followed by urban residents with a rural birthplace. CONCLUSIONS: Prevalence rates of depression were increased in the urban sample regardless of previous urban/rural residence. Reduced social support was particularly strongly associated with depression in people with a rural upbringing.