Pretraining Vision-Language Model for Difference Visual Question Answering in Longitudinal Chest X-rays

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Main Authors: Cho, Yeongjae, Kim, Taehee, Shin, Heejun, Cho, Sungzoon, Shin, Dongmyung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cho, Yeongjae
Kim, Taehee
Shin, Heejun
Cho, Sungzoon
Shin, Dongmyung
author_facet Cho, Yeongjae
Kim, Taehee
Shin, Heejun
Cho, Sungzoon
Shin, Dongmyung
contents Difference visual question answering (diff-VQA) is a challenging task that requires answering complex questions based on differences between a pair of images. This task is particularly important in reading chest X-ray images because radiologists often compare multiple images of the same patient taken at different times to track disease progression and changes in its severity in their clinical practice. However, previous works focused on designing specific network architectures for the diff-VQA task, missing opportunities to enhance the model's performance using a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). Here, we introduce a novel VLM called PLURAL, which is pretrained on natural and longitudinal chest X-ray data for the diff-VQA task. The model is developed using a step-by-step approach, starting with being pretrained on natural images and texts, followed by being trained using longitudinal chest X-ray data. The longitudinal data consist of pairs of X-ray images, along with question-answer sets and radiologist's reports that describe the changes in lung abnormalities and diseases over time. Our experimental results show that the PLURAL model outperforms state-of-the-art methods not only in diff-VQA for longitudinal X-rays but also in conventional VQA for a single X-ray image. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VLM architecture and pretraining method in improving the model's performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_08966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pretraining Vision-Language Model for Difference Visual Question Answering in Longitudinal Chest X-rays
Cho, Yeongjae
Kim, Taehee
Shin, Heejun
Cho, Sungzoon
Shin, Dongmyung
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Difference visual question answering (diff-VQA) is a challenging task that requires answering complex questions based on differences between a pair of images. This task is particularly important in reading chest X-ray images because radiologists often compare multiple images of the same patient taken at different times to track disease progression and changes in its severity in their clinical practice. However, previous works focused on designing specific network architectures for the diff-VQA task, missing opportunities to enhance the model's performance using a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). Here, we introduce a novel VLM called PLURAL, which is pretrained on natural and longitudinal chest X-ray data for the diff-VQA task. The model is developed using a step-by-step approach, starting with being pretrained on natural images and texts, followed by being trained using longitudinal chest X-ray data. The longitudinal data consist of pairs of X-ray images, along with question-answer sets and radiologist's reports that describe the changes in lung abnormalities and diseases over time. Our experimental results show that the PLURAL model outperforms state-of-the-art methods not only in diff-VQA for longitudinal X-rays but also in conventional VQA for a single X-ray image. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VLM architecture and pretraining method in improving the model's performance.
title Pretraining Vision-Language Model for Difference Visual Question Answering in Longitudinal Chest X-rays
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08966