HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation

Abstract: We present HealthGPT, a powerful Medical Large Vision-LLM (Med-LVLM) that integrates medical visual comprehension and generation capabilities within a unified autoregressive paradigm. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to progressively adapt heterogeneous comprehension and generation knowledge to pre-trained LLMs. This is achieved through a novel heterogeneous low-rank adaptation (H-LoRA) technique, which is complemented by a tailored hierarchical visual perception approach and a three-stage learning strategy. To effectively learn the HealthGPT, we devise a comprehensive medical domain-specific comprehension and generation dataset called VL-Health. Experimental results demonstrate exceptional performance and scalability of HealthGPT in medical visual unified tasks. Our project can be accessed at https://github.com/DCDmllm/HealthGPT.