Embedding Radiomics into Vision Transformers for Multimodal Medical Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yang, Zhenyu, Zhu, Haiming, Zhang, Rihui, Zhang, Haipeng, Wang, Jianliang, Wang, Chunhao, Chen, Minbin, Yin, Fang-Fang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yang, Zhenyu
Zhu, Haiming
Zhang, Rihui
Zhang, Haipeng
Wang, Jianliang
Wang, Chunhao
Chen, Minbin
Yin, Fang-Fang
author_facet Yang, Zhenyu
Zhu, Haiming
Zhang, Rihui
Zhang, Haipeng
Wang, Jianliang
Wang, Chunhao
Chen, Minbin
Yin, Fang-Fang
contents Background: Deep learning has significantly advanced medical image analysis, with Vision Transformers (ViTs) offering a powerful alternative to convolutional models by modeling long-range dependencies through self-attention. However, ViTs are inherently data-intensive and lack domain-specific inductive biases, limiting their applicability in medical imaging. In contrast, radiomics provides interpretable, handcrafted descriptors of tissue heterogeneity but suffers from limited scalability and integration into end-to-end learning frameworks. In this work, we propose the Radiomics-Embedded Vision Transformer (RE-ViT) that combines radiomic features with data-driven visual embeddings within a ViT backbone. Purpose: To develop a hybrid RE-ViT framework that integrates radiomics and patch-wise ViT embeddings through early fusion, enhancing robustness and performance in medical image classification. Methods: Following the standard ViT pipeline, images were divided into patches. For each patch, handcrafted radiomic features were extracted and fused with linearly projected pixel embeddings. The fused representations were normalized, positionally encoded, and passed to the ViT encoder. A learnable [CLS] token aggregated patch-level information for classification. We evaluated RE-ViT on three public datasets (including BUSI, ChestXray2017, and Retinal OCT) using accuracy, macro AUC, sensitivity, and specificity. RE-ViT was benchmarked against CNN-based (VGG-16, ResNet) and hybrid (TransMed) models. Results: RE-ViT achieved state-of-the-art results: on BUSI, AUC=0.950+/-0.011; on ChestXray2017, AUC=0.989+/-0.004; on Retinal OCT, AUC=0.986+/-0.001, which outperforms other comparison models. Conclusions: The RE-ViT framework effectively integrates radiomics with ViT architectures, demonstrating improved performance and generalizability across multimodal medical image classification tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Embedding Radiomics into Vision Transformers for Multimodal Medical Image Classification
Yang, Zhenyu
Zhu, Haiming
Zhang, Rihui
Zhang, Haipeng
Wang, Jianliang
Wang, Chunhao
Chen, Minbin
Yin, Fang-Fang
Medical Physics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Background: Deep learning has significantly advanced medical image analysis, with Vision Transformers (ViTs) offering a powerful alternative to convolutional models by modeling long-range dependencies through self-attention. However, ViTs are inherently data-intensive and lack domain-specific inductive biases, limiting their applicability in medical imaging. In contrast, radiomics provides interpretable, handcrafted descriptors of tissue heterogeneity but suffers from limited scalability and integration into end-to-end learning frameworks. In this work, we propose the Radiomics-Embedded Vision Transformer (RE-ViT) that combines radiomic features with data-driven visual embeddings within a ViT backbone. Purpose: To develop a hybrid RE-ViT framework that integrates radiomics and patch-wise ViT embeddings through early fusion, enhancing robustness and performance in medical image classification. Methods: Following the standard ViT pipeline, images were divided into patches. For each patch, handcrafted radiomic features were extracted and fused with linearly projected pixel embeddings. The fused representations were normalized, positionally encoded, and passed to the ViT encoder. A learnable [CLS] token aggregated patch-level information for classification. We evaluated RE-ViT on three public datasets (including BUSI, ChestXray2017, and Retinal OCT) using accuracy, macro AUC, sensitivity, and specificity. RE-ViT was benchmarked against CNN-based (VGG-16, ResNet) and hybrid (TransMed) models. Results: RE-ViT achieved state-of-the-art results: on BUSI, AUC=0.950+/-0.011; on ChestXray2017, AUC=0.989+/-0.004; on Retinal OCT, AUC=0.986+/-0.001, which outperforms other comparison models. Conclusions: The RE-ViT framework effectively integrates radiomics with ViT architectures, demonstrating improved performance and generalizability across multimodal medical image classification tasks.
title Embedding Radiomics into Vision Transformers for Multimodal Medical Image Classification
topic Medical Physics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10916