VisionCLIP: An Med-AIGC based Ethical Language-Image Foundation Model for Generalizable Retina Image Analysis

Generalist foundation model has ushered in newfound capabilities in medical domain. However, the contradiction between the growing demand for high-quality annotated data with patient privacy continues to intensify. The utilization of medical artificial intelligence generated content (Med-AIGC) as an inexhaustible resource repository arises as a potential solution to address the aforementioned challenge. Here we harness 1 million open-source synthetic fundus images paired with natural language descriptions, to curate an ethical language-image foundation model for retina image analysis named VisionCLIP. VisionCLIP achieves competitive performance on three external datasets compared with the existing method pre-trained on real-world data in a zero-shot fashion. The employment of artificially synthetic images alongside corresponding textual data for training enables the medical foundation model to successfully assimilate knowledge of disease symptomatology, thereby circumventing potential breaches of patient confidentiality.