  Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models have been demonstrated to be
effective in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we consider
developing a VLP model in the medical domain for making computer-aided
diagnoses (CAD) based on image scans and text descriptions in electronic health
records, as done in practice. To achieve our goal, we present a lightweight CAD
system MedBLIP, a new paradigm for bootstrapping VLP from off-the-shelf frozen
pre-trained image encoders and frozen large language models. We design a
MedQFormer module to bridge the gap between 3D medical images and 2D
pre-trained image encoders and language models as well. To evaluate the
effectiveness of our MedBLIP, we collect more than 30,000 image volumes from
five public Alzheimer's disease (AD) datasets, i.e., ADNI, NACC, OASIS, AIBL,
and MIRIAD. On this largest AD dataset we know, our model achieves the SOTA
performance on the zero-shot classification of healthy, mild cognitive
impairment (MCI), and AD subjects, and shows its capability of making medical
visual question answering (VQA). The code and pre-trained models is available
online: https://github.com/Qybc/MedBLIP.
