LLaVA-Ultra: Large Chinese Language and Vision Assistant for Ultrasound
This addresses the need for more accurate and visually relevant medical AI assistants in ultrasound diagnostics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multimodal language models with domain-specific tuning.
The paper tackles the problem of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) by proposing a fine-grained adaptive VLM architecture for Chinese ultrasound data, resulting in LLaVA-Ultra surpassing previous state-of-the-art models on three Med-VQA datasets with strong capability and robustness.
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) has recently garnered attention as a prominent research focus. By harnessing powerful LLM, it facilitates a transition of conversational generative AI from unimodal text to performing multimodal tasks. This boom begins to significantly impact medical field. However, general visual language model (VLM) lacks sophisticated comprehension for medical visual question answering (Med-VQA). Even models specifically tailored for medical domain tend to produce vague answers with weak visual relevance. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained adaptive VLM architecture for Chinese medical visual conversations through parameter-efficient tuning. Specifically, we devise a fusion module with fine-grained vision encoders to achieve enhancement for subtle medical visual semantics. Then we note data redundancy common to medical scenes is ignored in most prior works. In cases of a single text paired with multiple figures, we utilize weighted scoring with knowledge distillation to adaptively screen valid images mirroring text descriptions. For execution, we leverage a large-scale multimodal Chinese ultrasound dataset obtained from the hospital. We create instruction-following data based on text from professional doctors, which ensures effective tuning. With enhanced model and quality data, our Large Chinese Language and Vision Assistant for Ultrasound (LLaVA-Ultra) shows strong capability and robustness to medical scenarios. On three Med-VQA datasets, LLaVA-Ultra surpasses previous state-of-the-art models on various metrics.