PaliGemma-CXR: A Multi-task Multimodal Model for TB Chest X-ray Interpretation

Tuberculosis (TB) is a infectious global health challenge. Chest X-rays are a standard method for TB screening, yet many countries face a critical shortage of radiologists capable of interpreting these images. Machine learning offers an alternative, as it can automate tasks such as disease diagnosis, and report generation. However, traditional approaches rely on task-specific models, which cannot utilize the interdependence between tasks. Building a multi-task model capable of performing multiple tasks poses additional challenges such as scarcity of multimodal data, dataset imbalance, and negative transfer. To address these challenges, we propose PaliGemma-CXR, a multi-task multimodal model capable of performing TB diagnosis, object detection, segmentation, report generation, and VQA. Starting with a dataset of chest X-ray images annotated with TB diagnosis labels and segmentation masks, we curated a multimodal dataset to support additional tasks. By finetuning PaliGemma on this dataset and sampling data using ratios of the inverse of the size of task datasets, we achieved the following results across all tasks: 90.32% accuracy on TB diagnosis and 98.95% on close-ended VQA, 41.3 BLEU score on report generation, and a mAP of 19.4 and 16.0 on object detection and segmentation, respectively. These results demonstrate that PaliGemma-CXR effectively leverages the interdependence between multiple image interpretation tasks to enhance performance.