Composed Vision-Language Retrieval for Skin Cancer Case Search via Joint Alignment of Global and Local Representations

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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Yuheng, Lin, Yuji, Cai, Jiayue, Wang, Z. Jane, Lee, Tim K.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wang, Yuheng
Lin, Yuji
Cai, Jiayue
Wang, Z. Jane
Lee, Tim K.
author_facet Wang, Yuheng
Lin, Yuji
Cai, Jiayue
Wang, Z. Jane
Lee, Tim K.
contents Medical image retrieval aims to identify clinically relevant lesion cases to support diagnostic decision making, education, and quality control. In practice, retrieval queries often combine a reference lesion image with textual descriptors such as dermoscopic features. We study composed vision-language retrieval for skin cancer, where each query consists of an image to text pair and the database contains biopsy-confirmed, multi-class disease cases. We propose a transformer based framework that learns hierarchical composed query representations and performs joint global-local alignment between queries and candidate images. Local alignment aggregates discriminative regions via multiple spatial attention masks, while global alignment provides holistic semantic supervision. The final similarity is computed through a convex, domain-informed weighting that emphasizes clinically salient local evidence while preserving global consistency. Experiments on the public Derm7pt dataset demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The proposed framework enables efficient access to relevant medical records and supports practical clinical deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09108
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Composed Vision-Language Retrieval for Skin Cancer Case Search via Joint Alignment of Global and Local Representations
Wang, Yuheng
Lin, Yuji
Cai, Jiayue
Wang, Z. Jane
Lee, Tim K.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Medical image retrieval aims to identify clinically relevant lesion cases to support diagnostic decision making, education, and quality control. In practice, retrieval queries often combine a reference lesion image with textual descriptors such as dermoscopic features. We study composed vision-language retrieval for skin cancer, where each query consists of an image to text pair and the database contains biopsy-confirmed, multi-class disease cases. We propose a transformer based framework that learns hierarchical composed query representations and performs joint global-local alignment between queries and candidate images. Local alignment aggregates discriminative regions via multiple spatial attention masks, while global alignment provides holistic semantic supervision. The final similarity is computed through a convex, domain-informed weighting that emphasizes clinically salient local evidence while preserving global consistency. Experiments on the public Derm7pt dataset demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The proposed framework enables efficient access to relevant medical records and supports practical clinical deployment.
title Composed Vision-Language Retrieval for Skin Cancer Case Search via Joint Alignment of Global and Local Representations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09108