MLIP: Enhancing Medical Visual Representation with Divergence Encoder and Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning

Zhe Li, Laurence T. Yang, Bocheng Ren, Xin Nie, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan, Stan Z. Li

Abstract: The scarcity of annotated data has sparked signifi-cant interest in unsupervised pre-training methods that leverage medical reports as auxiliary signals for medi-cal visual representation learning. However, existing re-search overlooks the multi-granularity nature of medical visual representation and lacks suitable contrastive learning techniques to improve the models' generalizability across different granularities, leading to the underutilization of image-text information. To address this, we pro-pose MLIP, a novel framework leveraging domain-specific medical knowledge as guiding signals to integrate language information into the visual domain through image-text contrastive learning. Our model includes global contrastive learning with our designed divergence encoder, lo-cal token-knowledge-patch alignment contrastive learning, and knowledge-guided category-level contrastive learning with expert knowledge. Experimental evaluations reveal the efficacy of our model in enhancing transfer performance for tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Notably, MLIP surpasses state-of-the-art methods even with limited annotated data, highlighting the potential of multimodal pre-training in advancing medical representation learning.11Codes are available at https://github.com/gentlefress/MLIP