PatchCLIP enables region specific contrastive health record and image joint training with patch embedding loss

Vision-Language (VL) models such as Contrastive Language-Image pretraining (CLIP) have shown remarkable zero-shot classification capabilities by jointly learning from large-scale image-text datasets using multimodal self-supervised learning (SSL). However, while these models capture strong global semantics, they often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding, thereby limiting their effectiveness in downstream tasks like object detection and medical abnormality localization². To address this limitation, we propose Patch-CLIP, a novel VL framework that introduces a contrastive loss aligning image patch-level embeddings with text embeddings. Unlike conventional VL approaches that only leverage global image representations, our method utilizes local patch-level features to encode spatial context, enabling effective learning of localization cues. Applied to two Chest X-ray (CXR) datasets, Patch-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across eight abnormality detection tasks. Furthermore, the resulting patch prediction maps substantially reduce false positives at comparable sensitivity levels compared to standard saliency-based methods, providing more precise and interpretable localization of key findings. The code is available at https://github.com/Siemens-Healthineers/patch-clip.