Customizing General-Purpose Foundation Models for Medical Report Generation
It addresses the challenge of generating accurate medical reports from images, which is crucial for healthcare but incremental as it adapts existing models.
The paper tackles medical report generation from images by customizing foundation models like EVA-ViT-g and ChatGLM-6B, achieving 4th and 2nd place out of 13 teams in a competition based on BERTScore and ROUGE-1 metrics.
Medical caption prediction which can be regarded as a task of medical report generation (MRG), requires the automatic generation of coherent and accurate captions for the given medical images. However, the scarcity of labelled medical image-report pairs presents great challenges in the development of deep and large-scale neural networks capable of harnessing the potential artificial general intelligence power like large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose customizing off-the-shelf general-purpose large-scale pre-trained models, i.e., foundation models (FMs), in computer vision and natural language processing with a specific focus on medical report generation. Specifically, following BLIP-2, a state-of-the-art vision-language pre-training approach, we introduce our encoder-decoder-based MRG model. This model utilizes a lightweight query Transformer to connect two FMs: the giant vision Transformer EVA-ViT-g and a bilingual LLM trained to align with human intentions (referred to as ChatGLM-6B). Furthermore, we conduct ablative experiments on the trainable components of the model to identify the crucial factors for effective transfer learning. Our findings demonstrate that unfreezing EVA-ViT-g to learn medical image representations, followed by parameter-efficient training of ChatGLM-6B to capture the writing styles of medical reports, is essential for achieving optimal results. Our best attempt (PCLmed Team) achieved the 4th and the 2nd, respectively, out of 13 participating teams, based on the BERTScore and ROUGE-1 metrics, in the ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2023 Caption Prediction Task competition.