Ram B. Gurung

Niyoj Oli, Sachin Acharya, Sandesh Pokhrel et al.

Gastrointestinal cancers represent a growing health burden in the South Asian region, driven largely by rapid changes in socio-economic conditions & lifestyle habits. However, early diagnosis of such malignancies remains a significant challenge, largely due to a lack of modern equipment, lack of financial support, and a scarcity of GI experts. AI-assisted diagnosis & report generation, show great promise in alleviating this problem by providing low-skill manpower the technical expertise to perform diagnosis. However, almost all open-source, publicly available datasets are predominantly collected from the European region, with no representation from the South Asian region. The lack of open-source GI datasets from diverse geographic regions has made it difficult to assess whether population bias is present in existing models, and to develop geographically inclusive AI tools for automated GI diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce SAGE: An Expert-Annotated South Asian GI Endoscopy dataset for image captioning, multi-label classification, and visual question answering (VQA) tasks. It consists of 1,300 images, their captions along with hallucination tag, 18 labels and 14,726 question-answer pairs making it well-suited for diverse range of tasks including classification, benchmarking, and fine-tuning large multimodal models (LMMs). We further conducted benchmarking of multi-class classifiers on the effect of population shift in GI imaging AI tasks, and contemporary LMMs on their performance. Our study reveals that task-specific models, such as multi-class classification models, suffer the most, with an average performance drop of 58% when evaluated on the South Asian dataset. For contemporary LMMs, benchmarking reveals a substantial drop in the average GREEN score for anatomical landmark detection (0.308) and abnormality detection (0.410).

Bidur Khanal, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sanjay Bhandari et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in the medical domain, bridging the gap between medical images and clinical language. Existing VLMs demonstrate an impressive ability to comprehend medical images and text queries to generate detailed, descriptive diagnostic medical reports. However, hallucination--the tendency to generate descriptions that are inconsistent with the visual content--remains a significant issue in VLMs, with particularly severe implications in the medical field. To facilitate VLM research on gastrointestinal (GI) image analysis and study hallucination, we curate a multimodal image-text GI dataset: Gut-VLM. This dataset is created using a two-stage pipeline: first, descriptive medical reports of Kvasir-v2 images are generated using ChatGPT, which introduces some hallucinated or incorrect texts. In the second stage, medical experts systematically review these reports, and identify and correct potential inaccuracies to ensure high-quality, clinically reliable annotations. Unlike traditional datasets that contain only descriptive texts, our dataset also features tags identifying hallucinated sentences and their corresponding corrections. A common approach to reducing hallucination in VLM is to finetune the model on a small-scale, problem-specific dataset. However, we take a different strategy using our dataset. Instead of finetuning the VLM solely for generating textual reports, we finetune it to detect and correct hallucinations, an approach we call hallucination-aware finetuning. Our results show that this approach is better than simply finetuning for descriptive report generation. Additionally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs across several metrics, establishing a benchmark. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/bhattarailab/Hallucination-Aware-VLM.