Ultrasound-CLIP: Semantic-Aware Contrastive Pre-training for Ultrasound Image-Text Understanding
This work addresses the problem of adapting AI models to ultrasound imaging for clinical diagnostics, representing an incremental improvement by tailoring existing methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of applying vision-language pre-training to ultrasound data by constructing a large-scale dataset and a semantic-aware contrastive learning framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on classification and retrieval benchmarks with strong generalization in zero-shot, linear probing, and fine-tuning tasks.
Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnostics due to its real-time capability and radiation-free nature. However, existing vision-language pre-training models, such as CLIP, are primarily designed for other modalities, and are difficult to directly apply to ultrasound data, which exhibit heterogeneous anatomical structures and diverse diagnostic attributes. To bridge this gap, we construct US-365K, a large-scale ultrasound image-text dataset containing 365k paired samples across 52 anatomical categories. We establish Ultrasonographic Diagnostic Taxonomy (UDT) containing two hierarchical knowledge frameworks. Ultrasonographic Hierarchical Anatomical Taxonomy standardizes anatomical organization, and Ultrasonographic Diagnostic Attribute Framework formalizes nine diagnostic dimensions, including body system, organ, diagnosis, shape, margins, echogenicity, internal characteristics, posterior acoustic phenomena, and vascularity. Building upon these foundations, we propose Ultrasound-CLIP, a semantic-aware contrastive learning framework that introduces semantic soft labels and semantic loss to refine sample discrimination. Moreover, we construct a heterogeneous graph modality derived from UDAF's textual representations, enabling structured reasoning over lesion-attribute relations. Extensive experiments with patient-level data splitting demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification and retrieval benchmarks, while also delivering strong generalization to zero-shot, linear probing, and fine-tuning tasks.