The integration of medical images with clinical context is essential for generating accurate and clinically interpretable radiology reports. However, current automated methods often rely on resource-heavy Large Language Models (LLMs) or static knowledge graphs and struggle with two fundamental challenges in real-world clinical data: (1) missing modalities, such as incomplete clinical context , and (2) feature entanglement, where mixed modality-specific and shared information leads to suboptimal fusion and clinically unfaithful hallucinated findings. To address these challenges, we propose the DiA-gnostic VLVAE, which achieves robust radiology reporting through Disentangled Alignment. Our framework is designed to be resilient to missing modalities by disentangling shared and modality-specific features using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based Vision-Language Variational Autoencoder (VLVAE). A constrained optimization objective enforces orthogonality and alignment between these latent representations to prevent suboptimal fusion. A compact LLaMA-X decoder then uses these disentangled representations to generate reports efficiently. On the IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, DiA has set new state-of-the-art BLEU@4 scores of 0.266 and 0.134, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Retinal image analysis is crucial for diagnosing and treating eye diseases, yet generating accurate medical reports from images remains challenging due to variability in image quality and pathology, especially with limited labeled data. Previous Transformer-based models struggled to integrate visual and textual information under limited supervision. In response, we propose a novel vision-language model for retinal image captioning that combines visual and textual features through a guided context self-attention mechanism. This approach captures both intricate details and the global clinical context, even in data-scarce scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DeepEyeNet dataset demonstrate a 0.023 BLEU@4 improvement, along with significant qualitative advancements, highlighting the effectiveness of our model in generating comprehensive medical captions.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63* accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

Automated retinal image medical description generation is crucial for streamlining medical diagnosis and treatment planning. Existing challenges include the reliance on learned retinal image representations, difficulties in handling multiple imaging modalities, and the lack of clinical context in visual representations. Addressing these issues, we propose the Multi-Modal Medical Transformer (M3T), a novel deep learning architecture that integrates visual representations with diagnostic keywords. Unlike previous studies focusing on specific aspects, our approach efficiently learns contextual information and semantics from both modalities, enabling the generation of precise and coherent medical descriptions for retinal images. Experimental studies on the DeepEyeNet dataset validate the success of M3T in meeting ophthalmologists’ standards, demonstrating a substantial 13.5% improvement in BLEU@4 over the best-performing baseline model.