# MediCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Few-shot Medical Image Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11315/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [SPot-the-Difference Self-Supervised Pre-training for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14315/) (2022)
- [WinCLIP: Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14814/) (2023)
- [AnomalyCLIP: Object-agnostic Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18961/) (2023)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04306/) (2022)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02855/) (2019)
- [Registration based Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07361/) (2022)
- [APRIL-GAN: A Zero-/Few-Shot Anomaly Classification and Segmentation Method for CVPR 2023 VAND Workshop Challenge Tracks 1&2: 1st Place on Zero-shot AD and 4th Place on Few-shot AD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17382/) (2023)
- [Natural Synthetic Anomalies for Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15222/) (2021)
- [Adapting Visual-Language Models for Generalizable Anomaly Detection in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12570/) (2024)
- [CLIP-AD: A Language-Guided Staged Dual-Path Model for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00453/) (2023)
- [SQUID: Deep Feature In-Painting for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13495/) (2021)
- [Dual-Distribution Discrepancy for Anomaly Detection in Chest X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03935/) (2022)
- [Many tasks make light work: Learning to localise medical anomalies from multiple synthetic tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00899/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [MadCLIP: Few-shot Medical Anomaly Detection with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23810/) (2025)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [CLIP meets DINO for Tuning Zero-Shot Classifier using Unlabeled Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19346/) (2024)
- [Is Hyperbolic Space All You Need for Medical Anomaly Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21228/) (2025)
- [UltraAD: Fine-Grained Ultrasound Anomaly Classification via Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19694/) (2025)
- [Continual-MEGA: A Large-scale Benchmark for Generalizable Continual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00956/) (2025)
- [Unified Supervision For Vision-Language Modeling in 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01554/) (2025)
- [Adaptation of Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01284/) (2025)
- [Dual Distillation for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01713/) (2026)
- [Exploring Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with CLIP in Medical Imaging: Are We There Yet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09310/) (2024)
- [HiLa: Hierarchical Vision-Language Collaboration for Cancer Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04613/) (2025)
- [MADPOT: Medical Anomaly Detection with CLIP Adaptation and Partial Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06733/) (2025)
- [Intra-Class Probabilistic Embeddings for Uncertainty Estimation in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22019/) (2025)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Using Synthetic Data and Domain Knowledge for Improved Text-Based Learning for LGE Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12948/) (2025)
- [IQE-CLIP: Instance-aware Query Embedding for Zero-/Few-shot Anomaly Detection in Medical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10730/) (2025)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Adaptation of CLIP via a Self-Trained Alignment Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09615/) (2025)
- [Similarity-as-Evidence: Calibrating Overconfident VLMs for Interpretable and Label-Efficient Medical Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18867/) (2026)
- [CL-Anomaly: Layer-Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts with Multimodal Large Language Model for Continual Learning in Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02930/) (2026)
- [Two Is Better Than One: Aligned Representation Pairs for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18848/) (2024)
- [Adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models to Medical Diagnosis via Query-Driven Expert Bridging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21698/) (2025)
- [UniADC: A Unified Framework for Anomaly Detection and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06644/) (2025)
- [XAI-CLIP: ROI-Guided Perturbation Framework for Explainable Medical Image Segmentation in Multimodal Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07017/) (2026)
- [Underrepresented in Foundation Model Pretraining Data? A One-Shot Probe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04346/) (2026)
- [Toward Clinically Ready Foundation Models in Medical Image Analysis: Adaptation Mechanisms and Deployment Trade-offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14271/) (2026)
- [MedSAD-CLIP: Supervised CLIP with Token-Patch Cross-Attention for Medical Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17325/) (2026)
- [MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11197/) (2026)
- [MTL-MAD: Multi-Task Learners are Effective Medical Anomaly Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05891/) (2026)
- [Segmentation, Detection and Explanation: A Unified Framework for CT Appearance Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15997/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the field of medical decision-making, precise anomaly detection in medical imaging plays a pivotal role in aiding clinicians. However, previous work is reliant on large-scale datasets for training anomaly detection models, which increases the development cost. This paper first focuses on the task of medical image anomaly detection in the few-shot setting, which is critically significant for the medical field where data collection and annotation are both very expensive. We propose an innovative approach, MediCLIP, which adapts the CLIP model to few-shot medical image anomaly detection through self-supervised fine-tuning. Although CLIP, as a vision-language model, demonstrates outstanding zero-/fewshot performance on various downstream tasks, it still falls short in the anomaly detection of medical images. To address this, we design a series of medical image anomaly synthesis tasks to simulate common disease patterns in medical imaging, transferring the powerful generalization capabilities of CLIP to the task of medical image anomaly detection. When only few-shot normal medical images are provided, MediCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection and location compared to other methods. Extensive experiments on three distinct medical anomaly detection tasks have demonstrated the superiority of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/cnulab/MediCLIP.