LIMITR: Leveraging Local Information for Medical Image-Text Representation

Medical imaging analysis plays a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment of various medical conditions. This paper focuses on chest X-ray images and their corresponding radiological reports. It presents a new model that learns a joint X-ray image & report representation. The model is based on a novel alignment scheme between the visual data and the text, which takes into account both local and global information. Furthermore, the model integrates domain-specific information of two types—lateral images and the consistent visual structure of chest images. Our representation is shown to benefit three types of retrieval tasks: text-image retrieval, class-based retrieval, and phrase-grounding. Our code is publicly available1.