Disease-Informed Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Expertise scarcity and high cost of data annotation hinder the development of artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models for medical image analysis. Transfer learning provides a way to utilize the off-the-shelf foundation models to address the clinical challenges. However, such models encounter difficulties when adapting to new diseases not presented in their original pre-training datasets. Compounding this challenge is the limited availability of example cases for a new disease, which further leads to the poor performance of the existing transfer learning techniques. This paper proposes a novel method for transfer learning of foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to efficiently adapt them to a new disease with only a few examples. Such an effective adaptation of VLMs hinges on learning the nuanced representation of new disease concepts. By capitalizing on the joint visual-linguistic capabilities of VLMs, we introduce disease-informed contextual prompting in a novel disease prototype learning framework, which enables VLMs to quickly grasp the concept of the new disease, even with limited data. Extensive experiments across multiple pre-trained medical VLMs and multiple tasks showcase the notable enhancements in performance compared to other existing adaptation techniques. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/RPIDIAL/Disease-informed-VLM-Adaptation.