# Prompting Medical Large Vision-Language Models to Diagnose Pathologies by Visual Question Answering Source: [Prompting Medical Large Vision-Language Models to Diagnose Pathologies by Visual Question Answering]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:19:49.174Z Authors: Danfeng Guo, Demetri Terzopoulos Published: 2024-07-31T06:34:38.000Z ## Abstract Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant success in recent years, and they have been extended to the medical domain. Although demonstrating satisfactory performance on medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, Medical LVLMs (MLVLMs) suffer from the hallucination problem, which makes them fail to diagnose complex pathologies. Moreover, they readily fail to learn minority pathologies due to imbalanced training data. We propose two prompting strategies for MLVLMs that reduce hallucination and improve VQA performance. In the first strategy, we provide a detailed explanation of the queried pathology. In the second strategy, we fine-tune a cheap, weak learner to achieve high performance on a specific metric, and textually provide its judgment to the MLVLM. Tested on the MIMIC-CXR-JPG and Chexpert datasets, our methods significantly improve the diagnostic F1 score, with the highest increase being 0.27. We also demonstrate that our prompting strategies can be extended to general LVLM domains. Based on POPE metrics, it effectively suppresses the false negative predictions of existing LVLMs and improves Recall by approximately 0.07. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()