DCFormer: Efficient 3D Vision-Language Modeling with Decomposed Convolutions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ates, Gorkem Can, Xin, Yu, Gong, Kuang, Shao, Wei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ates, Gorkem Can
Xin, Yu
Gong, Kuang
Shao, Wei
author_facet Ates, Gorkem Can
Xin, Yu
Gong, Kuang
Shao, Wei
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely applied to 2D medical image analysis due to their ability to align visual and textual representations. However, extending VLMs to 3D imaging remains computationally challenging. Existing 3D VLMs often rely on Vision Transformers (ViTs), which are computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, or on 3D convolutions, which require large numbers of parameters and FLOPs as kernel size increases. We introduce DCFormer, an efficient 3D image encoder that factorizes 3D convolutions into three parallel 1D convolutions along the depth, height, and width dimensions. This design preserves spatial information while significantly reducing computational cost. Integrated into a CLIP-based vision-language framework, DCFormer is trained and evaluated on CT-RATE, a dataset of 50,188 paired 3D chest CT volumes and radiology reports. In zero-shot and fine-tuned detection of 18 pathologies, as well as in image-text retrieval tasks, DCFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D vision encoders, including CT-ViT, ViT, ConvNeXt, PoolFormer, and TransUNet. These results highlight DCFormer's potential for scalable, clinically deployable 3D medical VLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mirthAI/DCFormer.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DCFormer: Efficient 3D Vision-Language Modeling with Decomposed Convolutions
Ates, Gorkem Can
Xin, Yu
Gong, Kuang
Shao, Wei
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely applied to 2D medical image analysis due to their ability to align visual and textual representations. However, extending VLMs to 3D imaging remains computationally challenging. Existing 3D VLMs often rely on Vision Transformers (ViTs), which are computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, or on 3D convolutions, which require large numbers of parameters and FLOPs as kernel size increases. We introduce DCFormer, an efficient 3D image encoder that factorizes 3D convolutions into three parallel 1D convolutions along the depth, height, and width dimensions. This design preserves spatial information while significantly reducing computational cost. Integrated into a CLIP-based vision-language framework, DCFormer is trained and evaluated on CT-RATE, a dataset of 50,188 paired 3D chest CT volumes and radiology reports. In zero-shot and fine-tuned detection of 18 pathologies, as well as in image-text retrieval tasks, DCFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D vision encoders, including CT-ViT, ViT, ConvNeXt, PoolFormer, and TransUNet. These results highlight DCFormer's potential for scalable, clinically deployable 3D medical VLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mirthAI/DCFormer.
title DCFormer: Efficient 3D Vision-Language Modeling with Decomposed Convolutions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05091