用无配对报告提升病理图像分类,无需标注也能学多模态知识。
CLIP-IT: CLIP-based Pairing for Histology Images Classification
- 用CLIP模型从外部报告中检索最相关文本,构建伪配对数据。
- 在不依赖配对数据下,分类准确率超越单模态和传统多模态方法。
- 推理仅需视觉模型,适合资源受限的临床场景。
多模态学习在医学影像中展现出潜力,通过结合图像与文本等互补模态提升诊断能力。视觉语言模型(VLM)虽能捕捉丰富诊断线索,但通常需大量配对数据及基于提示或文本的推理,受限于标注成本、隐私问题和计算开销。关键在于,可用的免费非配对外部文本(如病理报告)若能检索到语义相关的部分,仍可提供补充诊断信息。为此,我们提出CLIP-IT框架,利用在独立数据集上预训练的CLIP模型,从非配对文本报告中为下游单模态数据集中的每张图像检索最相关的报告。这些来自相同疾病领域和组织类型的报告构成伪配对,反映共享临床语义而非精确对齐。训练时将文本知识提炼至视觉模型,同时采用LoRA适配缓解模态间语义差距。推理阶段仅使用视觉模型,保持低开销,但仍受益于多模态训练,且无需下游数据集中的配对数据。在多个病理图像数据集上的实验表明,CLIP-IT在多数情况下持续优于单模态及基于CLIP的多模态基线,且无需每数据集配对标注或推理时复杂度增加。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multimodal learning has shown promise in medical imaging, combining complementary modalities like images and text. Vision-language models (VLMs) capture rich diagnostic cues but often require large paired datasets and prompt- or text-based inference, limiting their practicality due to annotation cost, privacy, and compute demands. Crucially, available free unpaired external text, like pathology reports, can still provide complementary diagnostic cues if semantically relevant content is retrievable per image. To address this, we introduce CLIP-IT, a novel framework that relies on rich unpaired text reports. Specifically, CLIP-IT uses a CLIP model pre-trained on histology image-text pairs from a separate dataset to retrieve the most relevant unpaired textual report for each image in the downstream unimodal dataset. These reports, sourced from the same disease domain and tissue type, form pseudo-pairs that reflect shared clinical semantics rather than exact alignment. Knowledge from these texts is distilled into the vision model during training, while LoRA-based adaptation mitigates the semantic gap between unaligned modalities. At inference, only the vision model is used, keeping overhead low while still benefiting from multimodal training without requiring paired data in the downstream dataset. Experiments on histology image datasets confirm that CLIP-IT consistently improves classification accuracy over both unimodal and multimodal CLIP-based baselines in most cases, without the burden of per-dataset paired annotation or inference-time complexity.
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