Contrastive language image pretraining for a cardiac magnetic resonance image embedding with zero-shot capabilities

Vision-language models trained using self-supervised learning are crucial to reduce the dependency on large volumes of labeled data. However, conventional self-supervised approaches that rely on precise image-text pairing are not always feasible for cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) given its ability to visualize cardiac anatomy, physiology, and microstructure in a single exam. We present CMR-contrastive language image pretraining (CMR-CLIP), a vision language model which treats CMR images as videos to jointly learn embeddings between the images in the study and associated reports. The model is trained on a large dataset consisting of 11,028 studies performed at a single healthcare institution and evaluated on an internal test (N = 2,758) and external dataset (N = 428). CMR-CLIP achieves remarkable performance in real-world clinical tasks, achieving accuracies of 88.5% for non-ischemic cardiomyopathy, 88.0% for ischemic cardiomyopathy, 96.2% for cardiac amyloidosis, and 98.6% for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, potentially leading to more consistent diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. CMR-CLIP is a vision-language model trained using paired cardiac magnetic resonance images and reports. Here, the authors show the model enables zero-shot disease classification across a range of cardiovascular diseases, potentially enabling broad clinical decision support.