Hierarchical Deep Multi-modal Network for Medical Visual Question Answering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical deep multi-modal network for medical visual question answering that classifies question types to improve answer accuracy, outperforming baseline models on benchmark datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel question segregation technique integrated into a hierarchical neural network for medical VQA, enhancing answer relevance and accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms baseline models on RAD and CLEF18 datasets

Question segregation improves answer accuracy

Detailed analysis of errors and solutions

Abstract

Visual Question Answering in Medical domain (VQA-Med) plays an important role in providing medical assistance to the end-users. These users are expected to raise either a straightforward question with a Yes/No answer or a challenging question that requires a detailed and descriptive answer. The existing techniques in VQA-Med fail to distinguish between the different question types sometimes complicates the simpler problems, or over-simplifies the complicated ones. It is certainly true that for different question types, several distinct systems can lead to confusion and discomfort for the end-users. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical deep multi-modal network that analyzes and classifies end-user questions/queries and then incorporates a query-specific approach for answer prediction. We refer our proposed approach as Hierarchical Question Segregation based Visual Question Answering, in short HQS-VQA. Our contributions are three-fold, viz. firstly, we propose a question segregation (QS) technique for VQAMed; secondly, we integrate the QS model to the hierarchical deep multi-modal neural network to generate proper answers to the queries related to medical images; and thirdly, we study the impact of QS in Medical-VQA by comparing the performance of the proposed model with QS and a model without QS. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on two benchmark datasets, viz. RAD and CLEF18. Experimental results show that our proposed HQS-VQA technique outperforms the baseline models with significant margins. We also conduct a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the obtained results and discover potential causes of errors and their solutions.