RadCLIP: Enhancing Radiologic Image Analysis through Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with radiology has marked a transformative era in medical diagnostics. Vision foundation models have been adopted to enhance radiologic imaging analysis. However, the distinct complexities of radiological imaging, including the interpretation of 2D and 3D radiological data, pose unique challenges that existing models, trained on general non-medical images, fail to address adequately. To bridge this gap and capitalize on the diagnostic precision required in medical imaging, we introduce RadCLIP: a pioneering cross-modal foundational model that harnesses Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to refine radiologic image analysis. RadCLIP incorporates a novel 3D slice pooling mechanism tailored for volumetric image analysis and is trained using a comprehensive and diverse dataset of radiologic image-text pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that RadCLIP effectively aligns radiological images with their corresponding textual annotations, and in the meantime, offers a robust vision backbone for radiologic imagery with significant promise.