Shuai Ming | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

GreenRFM: Learning a resource-efficient radiology vision-language foundation model via supervision-centric pre-training

Radiology foundation models (RFMs) have largely inherited the scale-first recipe of natural-image vision--language pre-training. This recipe is difficult to deploy in 3D radiology, where training corpora are smaller, reports vary across institutions, and receiving hospitals often need local adaptation under privacy and compute constraints. We ask whether routine radiology reports can instead be converted into auditable diagnostic supervision that shapes the image encoder, text encoder, aligned space, and local-adaptation procedure. We develop GreenRFM, a supervision-centric pre-training framework organized around four empirical principles: More distilled, Ubiquitous, Semantic-enforcing, and Task-aligning (MUST) supervision. These principles convert noisy reports into structured diagnostic signals and use them to learn discriminative unimodal encoders plus an aligned image--text space for diagnosis-centered multimodal use. GreenRFM requires 24 GPU-hours on a single 24GB GPU (lightweight variant: 6GB VRAM, 4~hours) and reaches a zero-shot CT-RATE AUC of 84.8. Evaluations using more than 200,000 volumes from six institutions and two modalities show transfer to private clinical cohorts and to musculoskeletal MRI. On a local institutional cohort, computationally feasible retraining raises macro-AUC from 70.5 to 82.1. The aligned space also improves hepatocellular-carcinoma microvascular-invasion prediction and trans-arterial chemoembolization response analysis over established clinical scores. These results support supervision-centric pre-training as a practical route to resource-efficient, locally adaptable, diagnosis-centered radiology vision--language representations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

More performant and scalable: Rethinking contrastive vision-language pre-training of radiology in the LLM era

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents unprecedented opportunities to revolutionize medical contrastive vision-language pre-training. In this paper, we show how LLMs can facilitate large-scale supervised pre-training, thereby advancing vision-language alignment. We begin by demonstrate that modern LLMs can automatically extract diagnostic labels from radiology reports with remarkable precision (>96\% AUC in our experiments) without complex prompt engineering, enabling the creation of large-scale "silver-standard" datasets at a minimal cost (~\$3 for 50k CT image-report pairs). Further, we find that vision encoder trained on this "silver-standard" dataset achieves performance comparable to those trained on labels extracted by specialized BERT-based models, thereby democratizing the access to large-scale supervised pre-training. Building on this foundation, we proceed to reveal that supervised pre-training fundamentally improves contrastive vision-language alignment. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a 3D ResNet-18 with vanilla CLIP training, including 83.8\% AUC for zero-shot diagnosis on CT-RATE, 77.3\% AUC on RAD-ChestCT, and substantial improvements in cross-modal retrieval (MAP@50=53.7\% for image-image, Recall@100=52.2\% for report-image). These results demonstrate the potential of utilizing LLMs to facilitate {\bf more performant and scalable} medical AI systems. Our code is avaiable at https://github.com/SadVoxel/More-performant-and-scalable.

cs.CV↗