CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yue, Yang, Wang, Yulin, Tao, Chenxin, Liu, Pan, Song, Shiji, Huang, Gao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866915250047025152
author Yue, Yang
Wang, Yulin
Tao, Chenxin
Liu, Pan
Song, Shiji
Huang, Gao
author_facet Yue, Yang
Wang, Yulin
Tao, Chenxin
Liu, Pan
Song, Shiji
Huang, Gao
contents Humans can develop internal world models that encode common sense knowledge, telling them how the world works and predicting the consequences of their actions. This concept has emerged as a promising direction for establishing general-purpose machine-learning models in recent preliminary works, e.g., for visual representation learning. In this paper, we present CheXWorld, the first effort towards a self-supervised world model for radiographic images. Specifically, our work develops a unified framework that simultaneously models three aspects of medical knowledge essential for qualified radiologists, including 1) local anatomical structures describing the fine-grained characteristics of local tissues (e.g., architectures, shapes, and textures); 2) global anatomical layouts describing the global organization of the human body (e.g., layouts of organs and skeletons); and 3) domain variations that encourage CheXWorld to model the transitions across different appearance domains of radiographs (e.g., varying clarity, contrast, and exposure caused by collecting radiographs from different hospitals, devices, or patients). Empirically, we design tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, revealing that CheXWorld successfully captures these three dimensions of medical knowledge. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments across eight medical image classification and segmentation benchmarks showcase that CheXWorld significantly outperforms existing SSL methods and large-scale medical foundation models. Code & pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/CheXWorld.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13820
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning
Yue, Yang
Wang, Yulin
Tao, Chenxin
Liu, Pan
Song, Shiji
Huang, Gao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Humans can develop internal world models that encode common sense knowledge, telling them how the world works and predicting the consequences of their actions. This concept has emerged as a promising direction for establishing general-purpose machine-learning models in recent preliminary works, e.g., for visual representation learning. In this paper, we present CheXWorld, the first effort towards a self-supervised world model for radiographic images. Specifically, our work develops a unified framework that simultaneously models three aspects of medical knowledge essential for qualified radiologists, including 1) local anatomical structures describing the fine-grained characteristics of local tissues (e.g., architectures, shapes, and textures); 2) global anatomical layouts describing the global organization of the human body (e.g., layouts of organs and skeletons); and 3) domain variations that encourage CheXWorld to model the transitions across different appearance domains of radiographs (e.g., varying clarity, contrast, and exposure caused by collecting radiographs from different hospitals, devices, or patients). Empirically, we design tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, revealing that CheXWorld successfully captures these three dimensions of medical knowledge. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments across eight medical image classification and segmentation benchmarks showcase that CheXWorld significantly outperforms existing SSL methods and large-scale medical foundation models. Code & pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/CheXWorld.
title CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13820