Clinical Prior Guided Hierarchical Vision-Language Pre-training for Medical Imaging Analysis

Konsep Inti

A novel clinical prior guided hierarchical vision-language pre-training framework, IMITATE, that aligns multi-level visual features from medical images with the descriptive and conclusive textual features from hierarchical medical reports, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across various medical imaging downstream tasks.

Abstrak

The paper proposes a novel clinical prior guided vision-language pre-training (VLP) framework called IMITATE that addresses the challenge of aligning medical images and reports in the medical domain.
Key highlights:

Existing VLP methods often simplify medical reports into a unified entity or fragmented tokens, overlooking the inherent hierarchical structure of reports which consist of 'Findings' for descriptive content and 'Impressions' for conclusive observations.
IMITATE performs hierarchical alignment between multi-level visual features from medical images and the descriptive and conclusive textual features from the hierarchical medical reports.
A new clinical-informed contrastive loss (CICL) is introduced that incorporates clinical correlations among different image-report pairs during the alignment process.
Comprehensive experiments on 6 datasets spanning 5 medical imaging downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of IMITATE compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Statistik

The MIMIC-CXR dataset contains 213,384 image-text pairs after preprocessing.
The CheXpert dataset has 186,027 training, 5,000 validation, and 202 test samples.
The RSNA dataset has 16,010 training, 5,337 validation, and 5,337 test samples.
The COVIDx dataset has 23,988 training, 5,998 validation, and 400 test samples.
The ChestX-ray14 dataset has 77,872 training, 8,652 validation, and 25,596 test samples.
The SIIM dataset has 8,433 training, 1,807 validation, and 1,807 test samples.
The Object-CXR dataset has 6,400 training, 1,600 validation, and 1,000 test samples.

Kutipan

"Conventional VLP methods align high-level visual features with the entire medical report, without distinguishing between the descriptive and conclusive sections in the report."
"We hypothesize that low-level visual features embody more descriptive properties of images corresponding to the descriptive part of the report, while high-level visual features contain more semantic information corresponding to the conclusive part of the report."
"Unlike traditional approaches that use a binary affinity matrix as the target, CICL constructs the affinity matrix based on the similarity among different image-report pairs."

Wawasan Utama Disaring Dari

IMITATE: Clinical Prior Guided Hierarchical Vision-Language Pre-training

by Che Liu,Sibo... pada arxiv.org 05-01-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.07355.pdf

Pertanyaan yang Lebih Dalam

How can the proposed hierarchical alignment strategy be extended to other modalities beyond medical images, such as radiology reports or pathology slides

The proposed hierarchical alignment strategy in the IMITATE framework can be extended to other modalities beyond medical images by adapting the alignment process to suit the specific characteristics of the new data types. For radiology reports, which contain textual information describing medical findings and impressions, a similar hierarchical alignment approach can be applied. The text from the reports can be split into different sections, such as findings, impressions, and recommendations, and aligned with corresponding visual features extracted from related images or charts. By incorporating the hierarchical structure of the reports, the model can learn to associate specific text segments with relevant visual content, improving the overall vision-language understanding.
For pathology slides, which consist of high-resolution images showing tissue samples, the hierarchical alignment strategy can be tailored to align different levels of visual features with textual descriptions provided by pathologists. Similar to medical reports, the text can be segmented into sections like observations, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations, and aligned with visual features representing different levels of detail in the pathology slides. This approach can help the model learn to link specific regions or characteristics in the images with corresponding textual information, enhancing the interpretation and analysis of pathology data.

What are the potential limitations of the clinical-informed contrastive loss, and how can it be further improved to better capture the nuances of medical data

The clinical-informed contrastive loss used in the IMITATE framework has several potential limitations that could impact its effectiveness in capturing the nuances of medical data. One limitation is the reliance on empirical correlation matrices derived from the text embeddings, which may not fully capture the complex relationships between different patients' visual and textual features. Additionally, the choice of the regularization coefficient λ in the smoothed correlation matrix could impact the model's sensitivity to clinical similarities and correlations in the data.
To improve the clinical-informed contrastive loss, several enhancements can be considered. One approach is to incorporate domain-specific knowledge or expert annotations to refine the correlation matrices and ensure they accurately reflect the clinical context. Additionally, exploring different regularization techniques or adaptive mechanisms for adjusting λ based on the data distribution could help optimize the contrastive loss for better alignment. Furthermore, integrating additional clinical features or metadata into the loss function could provide more context and improve the model's ability to capture subtle clinical nuances in the data.

Given the success of IMITATE in medical imaging tasks, how can the insights from this work be leveraged to enhance vision-language understanding in other healthcare domains, such as drug discovery or clinical decision support systems

The success of IMITATE in medical imaging tasks can be leveraged to enhance vision-language understanding in other healthcare domains, such as drug discovery and clinical decision support systems. By applying the hierarchical alignment strategy and clinical-informed contrastive loss to diverse healthcare data modalities, the model can learn to effectively link visual and textual information in various contexts.
In drug discovery, the model can be trained on molecular structures, chemical compounds, and associated text descriptions to learn the relationships between molecular features and drug properties. This can aid in predicting drug efficacy, side effects, and interactions based on visual representations of molecular structures and textual descriptions of drug characteristics.
For clinical decision support systems, the model can be applied to medical records, patient data, and treatment guidelines to assist healthcare professionals in making informed decisions. By aligning visual features from medical images with textual information from patient records and clinical guidelines, the model can provide personalized recommendations, diagnostic insights, and treatment suggestions based on a comprehensive understanding of the patient's condition and medical history.