Decomposing Disease Descriptions for Enhanced Pathology Detection: A Multi-Aspect Vision-Language Pre-training Framework
Authors: Vu Minh Hieu Phan, Yutong Xie, Yuankai Qi, Lingqiao Liu, Liyang Liu, Bowen Zhang, Zhibin Liao, Qi Wu, Minh-Son To, Johan W. Verjans

Medical vision language pre-training (VLP) has emerged as a frontier of research enabling zero-shot pathological recognition by comparing the query image with the textual descriptions for each disease. Due to the complex semantics of biomedical texts current methods struggle to align medical images with key pathological findings in unstructured reports. This leads to the misalignment with the target disease's textual representation. In this paper we introduce a novel VLP framework designed to dissect disease descriptions into their fundamental aspects leveraging prior knowledge about the visual manifestations of pathologies. This is achieved by consulting a large language model and medical experts. Integrating a Transformer module our approach aligns an input image with the diverse elements of a disease generating aspect-centric image representations. By consolidating the matches from each aspect we improve the compatibility between an image and its associated disease. Additionally capitalizing on the aspect-oriented representations we present a dual-head Transformer tailored to process known and unknown diseases optimizing the comprehensive detection efficacy. Conducting experiments on seven downstream datasets ours improves the accuracy of recent methods by up to 8.56% and 17.26% for seen and unseen categories respectively. Our code is released at https://github.com/HieuPhan33/MAVL.