Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), a simple yet effective pre-training paradigm, successfully introduces text supervision to vision models. It has shown promising results across various tasks, attributable to its generalizability and interpretability. The use of CLIP has recently gained increasing interest in the medical imaging domain, serving both as a pre-training paradigm for aligning medical vision and language, and as a critical component in diverse clinical tasks. With the aim of facilitating a deeper understanding of this promising direction, this survey offers an in-depth exploration of the CLIP paradigm within the domain of medical imaging, regarding both refined CLIP pre-training and CLIP-driven applications. In this study, We (1) start with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of CLIP methodology. (2) Then, we investigate the adaptation of CLIP pre-training in the medical domain, focusing on how to optimize CLIP given characteristics of medical images and reports. (3) Furthermore, we explore the practical utilization of CLIP pre-trained models in various tasks, including classification, dense prediction, and cross-modal tasks. (4) Finally, we discuss existing limitations of CLIP in the context of medical imaging and propose forward-looking directions to address the demands of medical imaging domain. We expect that this comprehensive survey will provide researchers in the field of medical image analysis with a holistic understanding of the CLIP paradigm and its potential implications. The project page can be found on https://github.com/zhaozh10/Awesome-CLIP-in-Medical-Imaging.

翻译：对比语言-图像预训练（CLIP）作为一种简单而有效的预训练范式，成功地将文本监督引入视觉模型。凭借其泛化性和可解释性，该范式在各类任务中展现出卓越性能。近年来，CLIP在医学影像领域的应用日益受到关注，既可作为对齐医学视觉与语言的预训练范式，也可作为多样化临床任务中的关键组件。为促进对这一前景广阔方向的深入理解，本综述系统探讨了CLIP范式在医学影像领域的应用，涵盖改良CLIP预训练及CLIP驱动的应用实践。本研究：（1）首先简要介绍CLIP方法论基础；（2）随后探究CLIP预训练在医学领域的适应性调整，重点分析如何根据医学影像与报告的独特性优化CLIP模型；（3）进一步考察CLIP预训练模型在分类、密集预测及跨模态任务等实际应用中的利用方式；（4）最后讨论CLIP在医学影像领域的现存局限性，并提出满足该领域需求的前瞻性研究方向。我们期望本综述能为医学图像分析领域的研究者提供关于CLIP范式及其潜在应用的全面认知。项目页面详见https://github.com/zhaozh10/Awesome-CLIP-in-Medical-Imaging。