# UniCAD: Efficient and Extendable Architecture for Multi-Task Computer-Aided Diagnosis System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09178 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09178/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [Customized Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13785/) (2023)
- [PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/) (2023)
- [MedKLIP: Medical Knowledge Enhanced Language-Image Pre-Training in Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02228/) (2023)
- [A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05382/) (2019)
- [SAM-Med3D: Towards General-purpose Segmentation Models for Volumetric Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15161/) (2023)
- [Residual-based Language Models are Free Boosters for Biomedical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17343/) (2024)
- [Joint Liver Lesion Segmentation and Classification via Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12352/) (2020)
- [Reprogramming Distillation for Medical Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06504/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing complexity and scale of visual model pre-training have made developing and deploying multi-task computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems increasingly challenging and resource-intensive. Furthermore, the medical imaging community lacks an open-source CAD platform to enable the rapid creation of efficient and extendable diagnostic models. To address these issues, we propose UniCAD, a unified architecture that leverages the robust capabilities of pre-trained vision foundation models to seamlessly handle both 2D and 3D medical images while requiring only minimal task-specific parameters. UniCAD introduces two key innovations: (1) Efficiency: A low-rank adaptation strategy is employed to adapt a pre-trained visual model to the medical image domain, achieving performance on par with fully fine-tuned counterparts while introducing only 0.17% trainable parameters. (2) Plug-and-Play: A modular architecture that combines a frozen foundation model with multiple plug-and-play experts, enabling diverse tasks and seamless functionality expansion. Building on this unified CAD architecture, we establish an open-source platform where researchers can share and access lightweight CAD experts, fostering a more equitable and efficient research ecosystem. Comprehensive experiments across 12 diverse medical datasets demonstrate that UniCAD consistently outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and deployment efficiency. The source code and project page are available at https://mii-laboratory.github.io/UniCAD/.