Bringing CLIP to the Clinic: Dynamic Soft Labels and Negation-Aware Learning for Medical Analysis

The development of large-scale image-text pair datasets has significantly advanced self-supervised learning in Vision-Language Processing (VLP). However, directly applying general-domain architectures such as CLIP to medical data presents challenges, particularly in handling negations and addressing the inherent data imbalance of medical datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that integrates clinically-enhanced dynamic soft labels and medical graphical alignment, thereby improving clinical comprehension and improving the applicability of contrastive loss in medical contexts. Furthermore, we introduce negation-based hard negatives to deepen the model’s understanding of the complexities of clinical language. Our approach integrates seamlessly into any medical CLIP training pipeline and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, including zero-shot, fine-tuned classification and report retrieval. To further assess our model’s capacity for clinical language comprehension, we introduce CXR-Align, a benchmark uniquely designed to evaluate the understanding of negation and clinical information within chest X-ray (CXR) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods are straightforward to implement and generalize effectively across contrastive learning frameworks, enhancing medical VLP capabilities and advancing clinical language understanding in medical imaging.