Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning for Vision-Grounded Medical Report Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Longzhen, Ni, Zhangkai, Wen, Ying, Liu, Yihang, He, Lianghua, Shen, Heng Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Longzhen
Ni, Zhangkai
Wen, Ying
Liu, Yihang
He, Lianghua
Shen, Heng Tao
author_facet Yang, Longzhen
Ni, Zhangkai
Wen, Ying
Liu, Yihang
He, Lianghua
Shen, Heng Tao
contents Vision-grounded medical report generation aims to produce clinically accurate descriptions of medical images, anchored in explicit visual evidence to improve interpretability and facilitate integration into clinical workflows. However, existing methods often rely on separately trained detection modules that require extensive expert annotations, introducing high labeling costs and limiting generalizability due to pathology distribution bias across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning (SS-ACL) -- a novel and annotation-free framework that aligns generated reports with corresponding anatomical regions using simple textual prompts. SS-ACL constructs a hierarchical anatomical graph inspired by the invariant top-down inclusion structure of human anatomy, organizing entities by spatial location. It recursively reconstructs fine-grained anatomical regions to enforce intra-sample spatial alignment, inherently guiding attention maps toward visually relevant areas prompted by text. To further enhance inter-sample semantic alignment for abnormality recognition, SS-ACL introduces a region-level contrastive learning based on anatomical consistency. These aligned embeddings serve as priors for report generation, enabling attention maps to provide interpretable visual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SS-ACL, without relying on expert annotations, (i) generates accurate and visually grounded reports -- outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 10\% in lexical accuracy and 25\% in clinical efficacy, and (ii) achieves competitive performance on various downstream visual tasks, surpassing current leading visual foundation models by 8\% in zero-shot visual grounding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25963
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning for Vision-Grounded Medical Report Generation
Yang, Longzhen
Ni, Zhangkai
Wen, Ying
Liu, Yihang
He, Lianghua
Shen, Heng Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-grounded medical report generation aims to produce clinically accurate descriptions of medical images, anchored in explicit visual evidence to improve interpretability and facilitate integration into clinical workflows. However, existing methods often rely on separately trained detection modules that require extensive expert annotations, introducing high labeling costs and limiting generalizability due to pathology distribution bias across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning (SS-ACL) -- a novel and annotation-free framework that aligns generated reports with corresponding anatomical regions using simple textual prompts. SS-ACL constructs a hierarchical anatomical graph inspired by the invariant top-down inclusion structure of human anatomy, organizing entities by spatial location. It recursively reconstructs fine-grained anatomical regions to enforce intra-sample spatial alignment, inherently guiding attention maps toward visually relevant areas prompted by text. To further enhance inter-sample semantic alignment for abnormality recognition, SS-ACL introduces a region-level contrastive learning based on anatomical consistency. These aligned embeddings serve as priors for report generation, enabling attention maps to provide interpretable visual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SS-ACL, without relying on expert annotations, (i) generates accurate and visually grounded reports -- outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 10\% in lexical accuracy and 25\% in clinical efficacy, and (ii) achieves competitive performance on various downstream visual tasks, surpassing current leading visual foundation models by 8\% in zero-shot visual grounding.
title Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning for Vision-Grounded Medical Report Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25963