Paper ID: 2310.04992

VisionFM: a Multi-Modal Multi-Task Vision Foundation Model for Generalist Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence

Jianing Qiu, Jian Wu, Hao Wei, Peilun Shi, Minqing Zhang, Yunyun Sun, Lin Li, Hanruo Liu, Hongyi Liu, Simeng Hou, Yuyang Zhao, Xuehui Shi, Junfang Xian, Xiaoxia Qu, Sirui Zhu, Lijie Pan, Xiaoniao Chen, Xiaojia Zhang, Shuai Jiang, Kebing Wang, Chenlong Yang, Mingqiang Chen, Sujie Fan, Jianhua Hu, Aiguo Lv, Hui Miao, Li Guo, Shujun Zhang, Cheng Pei, Xiaojuan Fan, Jianqin Lei, Ting Wei, Junguo Duan, Chun Liu, Xiaobo Xia, Siqi Xiong, Junhong Li, Benny Lo, Yih Chung Tham, Tien Yin Wong, Ningli Wang, Wu Yuan

We present VisionFM, a foundation model pre-trained with 3.4 million ophthalmic images from 560,457 individuals, covering a broad range of ophthalmic diseases, modalities, imaging devices, and demography. After pre-training, VisionFM provides a foundation to foster multiple ophthalmic artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as disease screening and diagnosis, disease prognosis, subclassification of disease phenotype, and systemic biomarker and disease prediction, with each application enhanced with expert-level intelligence and accuracy. The generalist intelligence of VisionFM outperformed ophthalmologists with basic and intermediate levels in jointly diagnosing 12 common ophthalmic diseases. Evaluated on a new large-scale ophthalmic disease diagnosis benchmark database, as well as a new large-scale segmentation and detection benchmark database, VisionFM outperformed strong baseline deep neural networks. The ophthalmic image representations learned by VisionFM exhibited noteworthy explainability, and demonstrated strong generalizability to new ophthalmic modalities, disease spectrum, and imaging devices. As a foundation model, VisionFM has a large capacity to learn from diverse ophthalmic imaging data and disparate datasets. To be commensurate with this capacity, in addition to the real data used for pre-training, we also generated and leveraged synthetic ophthalmic imaging data. Experimental results revealed that synthetic data that passed visual Turing tests, can also enhance the representation learning capability of VisionFM, leading to substantial performance gains on downstream ophthalmic AI tasks. Beyond the ophthalmic AI applications developed, validated, and demonstrated in this work, substantial further applications can be achieved in an efficient and cost-effective manner using VisionFM as the foundation.

Submitted: Oct 8, 2023