$M^3 QuestionIng$: Multi-modal Multi-span Medical Question Answering

Abstract: The growing adoption of AI in healthcare, particularly in preventive care, highlights the critical need for accessibility and precision in Medical Question Answering (MedQA). In recent years, significant efforts have been made to develop multi-span medical question-answering systems, where the answer to a query may span multiple sections or paragraphs of a source document. However, existing systems fall short of aligning with real-world scenarios, where source documents often include both textual and visual content, requiring answers to incorporate images for better comprehension. To address this gap, we propose $M^3QAFrame$, a multi-modal, multi-span medical question-answering framework that leverages visual cues to enhance the generation of comprehensive answers drawn from diverse textual and visual spans. The model takes the context, query, and images as input and outputs an answer containing both textual answers and relevant images. The text and image embeddings are processed using a transformer-based architecture to determine the sentence and image relevance. We curate a multi-modal, multi-span medical question-answering ($M^3 QuestionIng$) dataset containing queries, medical contexts, associated medical images, and extractive answers. Additionally, each query-answer pair is labeled with user intent and query type to enhance query and context comprehension. Extensive experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods across various evaluation metrics.