Papers › Towards Medical Artificial General Intelligence via Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Pretraining

Towards Medical Artificial General Intelligence via Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Pretraining

26 Apr 2023arXiv:2304.14204archive 2025-07-28

Bingqian Lin, Zicong Chen, Mingjie Li, Haokun Lin, Hang Xu, Yi Zhu, Jianzhuang Liu, Wenjia Cai, Lei Yang, Shen Zhao, Chenfei Wu, Ling Chen, Xiaojun Chang, Yi Yang, Lei Xing, Xiaodan Liang

Medical artificial general intelligence (MAGI) enables one foundation model to solve different medical tasks, which is very practical in the medical domain. It can significantly reduce the requirement of large amounts of task-specific data by sufficiently sharing medical knowledge among different tasks. However, due to the challenges of designing strongly generalizable models with limited and complex medical data, most existing approaches tend to develop task-specific models. To take a step towards MAGI, we propose a new paradigm called Medical-knOwledge-enhanced mulTimOdal pretRaining (MOTOR). In MOTOR, we combine two kinds of basic medical knowledge, i.e., general and specific knowledge, in a complementary manner to boost the general pretraining process. As a result, the foundation model with comprehensive basic knowledge can learn compact representations from pretraining radiographic data for better cross-modal alignment. MOTOR unifies the understanding and generation, which are two kinds of core intelligence of an AI system, into a single medical foundation model, to flexibly handle more diverse medical tasks. To enable a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical multimodal benchmark including a wide range of downstream tasks, such as chest x-ray report generation and medical visual question answering. Extensive experiments on our benchmark show that MOTOR obtains promising results through simple task-oriented adaptation. The visualization shows that the injected knowledge successfully highlights key information in the medical data, demonstrating the excellent interpretability of MOTOR. Our MOTOR successfully mimics the human practice of fulfilling a "medical student" to accelerate the process of becoming a "specialist". We believe that our work makes a significant stride in realizing MAGI.

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Medical Visual Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringVisual Question Answeringcross-modal alignment

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