MRM: Masked Relation Modeling for Medical Image Pre-Training with Genetics

Modern deep learning techniques on automatic multi-modal medical diagnosis rely on massive expert annotations, which is time-consuming and prohibitive. Recent masked image modeling (MIM)-based pre-training methods have witnessed impressive advances for learning meaningful representations from unlabeled data and transferring to downstream tasks. However, these methods focus on natural images and ignore the specific properties of medical data, yielding unsatisfying generalization performance on downstream medical diagnosis. In this paper, we aim to leverage genetics to boost image pre-training and present a masked relation modeling (MRM) framework. Instead of explicitly masking input data in previous MIM methods leading to loss of disease-related semantics, we design relation masking to mask out token-wise feature relation in both self- and cross-modality levels, which preserves intact semantics within the input and allows the model to learn rich disease-related information. Moreover, to enhance semantic relation modeling, we propose relation matching to align the sample-wise relation between the intact and masked features. The relation matching exploits inter-sample relation by encouraging global constraints in the feature space to render sufficient semantic relation for feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework is simple yet powerful, achieving state-of-the-art transfer performance on various downstream diagnosis tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/MRM.