ClinKD: Cross-Modal Clinical Knowledge Distiller For Multi-Task Medical Images

Abstract

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) represents a critical and challenging subtask within the general VQA domain. Despite significant advancements in general VQA, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still exhibit substantial limitations when handling multi-task VQA scenarios. These limitations manifest through erroneous spatial localization and misinterpretation of medical images, which primarily arise from two fundamental issues: inadequate image-text alignment and insufficient domain-specified knowledge for medical applications. To address these issues, we introduce the Cross-Modal Clinical Knowledge Distiller (ClinKD), an innovative framework designed to enhance image-text alignment and establish more effective medical knowledge transformation mechanisms, which enables MLLMs to perform better even when lacking prior medical knowledge. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the ClinKD achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets which are challenging for Med-VQA task. The results indicate that our approach not only significantly improves image-text alignment but also effectively enables MLLMs to adapt to the medical knowledge. The source code for ClinKD is available at: https://github.com/overloadedHenry/ClinKD.