MAKEN: Improving Medical Report Generation with Adapter Tuning and Knowledge Enhancement in Vision-Language Foundation Models

Medical report generation demands automatic creation of coherent and precise descriptions for medical images. However, the scarcity of labelled medical image-report pairs poses formidable challenges in developing large-scale neural networks capable of harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence, exemplified by large language models. This study builds upon the state-of-the-art vision-language pre-training and fine-tuning approach, BLIP-2, to customize general large-scale foundation models. Integrating adapter tuning and a medical knowledge enhancement loss, our model significantly improves accuracy and coherence. Validation on the dataset of ImageCLEFmedical 2023 demonstrates our model’s prowess, achieving the best-averaged results against several state-of-the-art methods. Significant improvements in ROUGE and CIDEr underscore our method’s efficacy, highlighting promising outcomes for the rapid medical-domain adaptation of the vision-language foundation models in addressing challenges posed by data scarcity. Our codes and model weights are available at https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenMedIA/MAKEN.