MMBERT: Multimodal BERT Pretraining for Improved Medical VQA

Images in the medical domain are fundamentally different from the general domain images. Consequently, it is infeasible to directly employ general domain Visual Question Answering (VQA) models for the medical domain. Additionally, medical image annotation is a costly and time-consuming process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a solution inspired by self-supervised pretraining of Transformer-style architectures for NLP, Vision, and Language tasks. Our method involves learning richer medical image and text semantic representations using Masked Vision-Language Modeling as the pretext task on a large medical image + caption dataset. The proposed solution achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two VQA datasets for radiology images - VQA-Med 2019 and VQA-RAD, outperforming even the ensemble models of previous best solutions. Moreover, our solution provides attention maps which help in model interpretability.