A Refer-and-Ground Multimodal Large Language Model for Biomedicine

With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially their capabilities in visual chat through refer and ground functionalities, their significance is increasingly recognized. However, the biomedical field currently exhibits a substantial gap in this area, primarily due to the absence of a dedicated refer and ground dataset for biomedical images. To address this challenge, we devised the Med-GRIT-270k dataset. It comprises 270k question-and-answer pairs and spans eight distinct medical imaging modalities. Most importantly, it is the first dedicated to the biomedical domain and integrating refer and ground conversations. The key idea is to sample large-scale biomedical image-mask pairs from medical segmentation datasets and generate instruction datasets from text using chatGPT. Additionally, we introduce a Refer-and-Ground Multimodal Large Language Model for Biomedicine (BiRD) by using this dataset and multi-task instruction learning. Extensive experiments have corroborated the efficacy of the Med-GRIT-270k dataset and the multi-modal, fine-grained interactive capabilities of the BiRD model. This holds significant reference value for the exploration and development of intelligent biomedical assistants.

SegICL: A Universal In-context Learning Framework for Enhanced Segmentation in Medical Imaging

Medical image segmentation models adapting to new tasks in a training-free manner through in-context learning is an exciting advancement. Universal segmentation models aim to generalize across the diverse modality of medical images, yet their effectiveness often diminishes when applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) data modalities and tasks, requiring intricate fine-tuning of model for optimal performance. For addressing this challenge, we introduce SegICL, a novel approach leveraging In-Context Learning (ICL) for image segmentation. Unlike existing methods, SegICL has the capability to employ text-guided segmentation and conduct in-context learning with a small set of image-mask pairs, eliminating the need for training the model from scratch or fine-tuning for OOD tasks (including OOD modality and dataset). Extensive experimental validation of SegICL demonstrates a positive correlation between the number of prompt samples and segmentation performance on OOD modalities and tasks. This indicates that SegICL effectively address new segmentation tasks based on contextual information. Additionally, SegICL also exhibits comparable segmentation performance to mainstream models on OOD and in-distribution tasks. Our code will be released soon.