NeuroVLM: A generative vision-language framework for human neuroimaging

Abstract Neuroimaging research has produced tens-of-thousands of articles that pair natural language and activation coordinate tables. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have provided methods to model text and images simultaneously. In this work, we present NeuroVLM, a model architecture for learning from 30,000 human neuroimage-text pairs. The architecture supports contrastive and generative objectives. The contrastive model ranks similarity between neuroimages and text. The generative models include text-to-neuroimage and neuroimage-to-text. These models are evaluated on network images from a variety of atlases, statistical maps from diverse publications, and images created from coordinate tables. These models are capable of generating atlases or maps given a text corpus, generating text interpretations of neuroimages, labeling networks, finding publications most related to a neuroimage query, or finding neuroimages most related to a text query. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Column titles in Fig. 3 were flipped and are now corrected.