MedQ-UNI: Toward Unified Medical Image Quality Assessment and Restoration via Vision-Language Modeling

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18465v1
• Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:51:28 GMT
• Title: MedQ-UNI: Toward Unified Medical Image Quality Assessment and Restoration via Vision-Language Modeling
• Abstract summary: Existing medical image restoration (Med-IR) methods are typically modality-specific or degradation-specific.<n>We argue this limitation stems from the isolation of Med-IR from medical image quality assessment (Med-IQA)<n>We propose MedQ-UNI, a unified vision-language model that follows an assess-then-restore paradigm.
• Score: 13.15979289867313
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Existing medical image restoration (Med-IR) methods are typically modality-specific or degradation-specific, failing to generalize across the heterogeneous degradations encountered in clinical practice. We argue this limitation stems from the isolation of Med-IR from medical image quality assessment (Med-IQA), as restoration models without explicit quality understanding struggle to adapt to diverse degradation types across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose MedQ-UNI, a unified vision-language model that follows an assess-then-restore paradigm, explicitly leveraging Med-IQA to guide Med-IR across arbitrary modalities and degradation types. MedQ-UNI adopts a multimodal autoregressive dual-expert architecture with shared attention: a quality assessment expert first identifies degradation issues through structured natural language descriptions, and a restoration expert then conditions on these descriptions to perform targeted image restoration. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale dataset of approximately 50K paired samples spanning three imaging modalities and five restoration tasks, each annotated with structured quality descriptions for joint Med-IQA and Med-IR training, along with a 2K-sample benchmark for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a single MedQ-UNI model, without any task-specific adaptation, achieves state-of-the-art restoration performance across all tasks while generating superior descriptions, confirming that explicit quality understanding meaningfully improves restoration fidelity and interpretability.

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