Incorporating Large Vision Model Distillation and Fuzzy Perception for Improving Disease Diagnosis

Early disease diagnosis is critical for timely clinical intervention and treatment. Intelligent models have shown significant potential in addressing the challenges of misdiagnosis, especially given the shortage of experienced experts. However, there exists complexity of ultrasound image information, and subtle differences between positive and negative samples, combined with limited disease data, pose challenges in feature extraction, class imbalance, and the lack of representative positive class prototypes. To this end, we propose a large vision model distillation framework with fuzzy perception to improve rare disease diagnosis. Specifically, we first fine-tune the pre-trained Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to adapt it to the target domain. Through image augmentation and latent feature relationship distillation, we enhance feature extraction robustness and reduce inter-class ambiguity, which helps mitigate the impact of class imbalance on the lightweight student model. Second, as imaging style differences in ultrasound images are often more pronounced than subtle variations between positive and negative samples, we construct image style subsets and introduce a fuzzy style matching strategy to perceive these differences. Finally, we combine features from both the differential perception and semantic enhancement branches to strengthen disease classification. Extensive experiments on an internal fetal spina bifida dataset and three widely used imbalanced benign-malignant medical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.