Scaling Down to Scale Up: Towards Operationally-Efficient and Deployable Clinical Models via Cross-Modal Low-Rank Adaptation for Medical Vision-Language Models

Foundation models trained via vision-language pretraining have demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities across diverse image domains, yet their application to volumetric medical imaging remains limited. We introduce MedCT-VLM: Medical CT Vision-Language Model, a parameter-efficient vision-language framework designed to adapt large-scale CT foundation models for downstream clinical tasks. MedCT-VLM uses a parameter-efficient approach to adapt CT-CLIP, a contrastive vision-language model trained on 25,692 chest CT volumes, for multi-label pathology classification using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Rather than fine-tuning the model's 440 M parameters directly, we insert low-rank decomposition matrices into attention layers of both vision and text encoders, training only 1.67M parameters (0.38% of total). We evaluate on zero-shot classification across 18 thoracic pathologies, where the model must align CT embeddings with unseen text prompts at inference without task-specific training. LoRA fine-tuning improves mean AUROC from 61.3% to 68.9% (+7.6 pp), accuracy from 67.2% to 73.6% (+6.4 pp), and macro-F1 from 32.1% to 36.9% (+4.8 pp). These results demonstrate that parameter-efficient methods can effectively transfer large-scale pretraining to downstream medical imaging tasks, particularly for zero-shot scenarios where labeled data is scarce.