Assessing the Diagnostic Accuracy of BiomedCLIP for Detecting Contrast Use and Esophageal Strictures in Pediatric...

Background/Objectives: Vision-language models such as BiomedCLIP are increasingly investigated for their diagnostic potential in medical imaging. Although these foundation models show promise in general radiographic interpretation, their application in pediatric domains-particularly for subtle, postoperative findings like esophageal strictures-remains underexplored. This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of BiomedCLIP in classifying pediatric esophageal radiographs into three clinically relevant categories: presence of contrast agent, full esophageal visibility, and presence of esophageal stricture. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 143 pediatric esophageal X-rays collected between 2021 and 2025. Each image was annotated by two pediatric radiology experts and categorized according to esophageal visibility, contrast presence, and stricture occurrence. BiomedCLIP was used in a zero-shot classification setup without fine-tuning. Model predictions were converted into binary outcomes and assessed against the ground truth using a comprehensive suite of 27 performance metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, AUC, and calibration analyses. Results: BiomedCLIP achieved high precision (88.7%) and a favorable AUC (85.4%) in detecting contrast agent presence, though specificity remained low (20%), leading to a high false-positive rate. The model correctly identified all cases of non-visible esophagus, but was untestable in predicting full visibility due to the absence of positive cases. Critically, its performance in detecting esophageal strictures was poor, with accuracy at 24%, sensitivity at 44%, specificity at 18%, and AUC of 0.26. Statistical overlap between contrast and stricture predictions indicated a lack of semantic differentiation within the model's latent space. Conclusions: BiomedCLIP shows potential in detecting high-salience features such as contrast but fails to reliably identify esophageal strictures. Limitations include class imbalance, absence of fine-tuning, and architectural constraints in recognizing subtle morphologic abnormalities. These findings emphasize the need for domain-specific adaptation of foundation models before clinical implementation in pediatric radiology.