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Main Authors: Tao, Yuhui, Zhao, Zhongwei, Wang, Zilong, Luo, Xufang, Chen, Feng, Wang, Kang, Wu, Chuanfu, Zhang, Xue, Zhang, Shaoting, Yao, Jiaxi, Jin, Xingwei, Jiang, Xinyang, Yang, Yifan, Li, Dongsheng, Qiu, Lili, Shao, Zhiqiang, Guo, Jianming, Yu, Nengwang, Wang, Shuo, Xiong, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16569
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author Tao, Yuhui
Zhao, Zhongwei
Wang, Zilong
Luo, Xufang
Chen, Feng
Wang, Kang
Wu, Chuanfu
Zhang, Xue
Zhang, Shaoting
Yao, Jiaxi
Jin, Xingwei
Jiang, Xinyang
Yang, Yifan
Li, Dongsheng
Qiu, Lili
Shao, Zhiqiang
Guo, Jianming
Yu, Nengwang
Wang, Shuo
Xiong, Ying
author_facet Tao, Yuhui
Zhao, Zhongwei
Wang, Zilong
Luo, Xufang
Chen, Feng
Wang, Kang
Wu, Chuanfu
Zhang, Xue
Zhang, Shaoting
Yao, Jiaxi
Jin, Xingwei
Jiang, Xinyang
Yang, Yifan
Li, Dongsheng
Qiu, Lili
Shao, Zhiqiang
Guo, Jianming
Yu, Nengwang
Wang, Shuo
Xiong, Ying
contents The non-invasive assessment of increasingly incidentally discovered renal masses is a critical challenge in urologic oncology, where diagnostic uncertainty frequently leads to the overtreatment of benign or indolent tumors. In this study, we developed and validated RenalCLIP using a dataset of 27,866 CT scans from 8,809 patients across nine Chinese medical centers and the public TCIA cohort, a visual-language foundation model for characterization, diagnosis and prognosis of renal mass. The model was developed via a two-stage pre-training strategy that first enhances the image and text encoders with domain-specific knowledge before aligning them through a contrastive learning objective, to create robust representations for superior generalization and diagnostic precision. RenalCLIP achieved better performance and superior generalizability across 10 core tasks spanning the full clinical workflow of kidney cancer, including anatomical assessment, diagnostic classification, and survival prediction, compared with other state-of-the-art general-purpose CT foundation models. Especially, for complicated task like recurrence-free survival prediction in the TCIA cohort, RenalCLIP achieved a C-index of 0.726, representing a substantial improvement of approximately 20% over the leading baselines. Furthermore, RenalCLIP's pre-training imparted remarkable data efficiency; in the diagnostic classification task, it only needs 20% training data to achieve the peak performance of all baseline models even after they were fully fine-tuned on 100% of the data. Additionally, it achieved superior performance in report generation, image-text retrieval and zero-shot diagnosis tasks. Our findings establish that RenalCLIP provides a robust tool with the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, refine prognostic stratification, and personalize the management of patients with kidney cancer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16569
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Disease-Centric Vision-Language Foundation Model for Precision Oncology in Kidney Cancer
Tao, Yuhui
Zhao, Zhongwei
Wang, Zilong
Luo, Xufang
Chen, Feng
Wang, Kang
Wu, Chuanfu
Zhang, Xue
Zhang, Shaoting
Yao, Jiaxi
Jin, Xingwei
Jiang, Xinyang
Yang, Yifan
Li, Dongsheng
Qiu, Lili
Shao, Zhiqiang
Guo, Jianming
Yu, Nengwang
Wang, Shuo
Xiong, Ying
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The non-invasive assessment of increasingly incidentally discovered renal masses is a critical challenge in urologic oncology, where diagnostic uncertainty frequently leads to the overtreatment of benign or indolent tumors. In this study, we developed and validated RenalCLIP using a dataset of 27,866 CT scans from 8,809 patients across nine Chinese medical centers and the public TCIA cohort, a visual-language foundation model for characterization, diagnosis and prognosis of renal mass. The model was developed via a two-stage pre-training strategy that first enhances the image and text encoders with domain-specific knowledge before aligning them through a contrastive learning objective, to create robust representations for superior generalization and diagnostic precision. RenalCLIP achieved better performance and superior generalizability across 10 core tasks spanning the full clinical workflow of kidney cancer, including anatomical assessment, diagnostic classification, and survival prediction, compared with other state-of-the-art general-purpose CT foundation models. Especially, for complicated task like recurrence-free survival prediction in the TCIA cohort, RenalCLIP achieved a C-index of 0.726, representing a substantial improvement of approximately 20% over the leading baselines. Furthermore, RenalCLIP's pre-training imparted remarkable data efficiency; in the diagnostic classification task, it only needs 20% training data to achieve the peak performance of all baseline models even after they were fully fine-tuned on 100% of the data. Additionally, it achieved superior performance in report generation, image-text retrieval and zero-shot diagnosis tasks. Our findings establish that RenalCLIP provides a robust tool with the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, refine prognostic stratification, and personalize the management of patients with kidney cancer.
title A Disease-Centric Vision-Language Foundation Model for Precision Oncology in Kidney Cancer
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16569