Medical Vision-Language Pre-Training for Brain Abnormalities.

Vision-language models have become increasingly powerful for tasks that require an understanding of both visual and linguistic elements, bridging the gap between these modalities. In the context of multimodal clinical AI, there is a growing need for models that possess domain-specific knowledge, as existing models often lack the expertise required for medical applications. In this paper, we take brain abnormalities as an example to demonstrate how to automatically collect medical image-text aligned data for pretraining from public resources such as PubMed. In particular, we present a pipeline that streamlines the pre-training process by initially collecting a large brain image-text dataset from case reports and published journals and subsequently constructing a high-performance vision-language model tailored to specific medical tasks. We also investigate the unique challenge of mapping subfigures to subcaptions in the medical domain. We evaluated the resulting model with quantitative and qualitative intrinsic evaluations. The resulting dataset and our code can be found here https://github.com/masoud-monajati/MedVL_pretraining_pipeline.

BERTHop: An Effective Vision-and-Language Model for Chest X-ray Disease Diagnosis.

Vision-and-language (V&L) models take image and text as input and learn to capture the associations between them. These models can potentially deal with the tasks that involve understanding medical images along with their associated text. However, applying V&L models in the medical domain is challenging due to the expensiveness of data annotations and the requirements of domain knowledge. In this paper, we identify that the visual representation in general V&L models is not suitable for processing medical data. To overcome this limitation, we propose BERTHop, a transformer-based model based on PixelHop++ and VisualBERT for better capturing the associations between clinical notes and medical images. Experiments on the OpenI dataset, a commonly used thoracic disease diagnosis benchmark, show that BERTHop achieves an average Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 98.12% which is 1.62% higher than state-of-the-art while it is trained on a 9× smaller dataset.