Anatomy-Activated Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Medical Vision-Language Pre-training

arXiv:2611.10960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) leverages the semantic richness of radiology reports to learn 3D representations, yet current architectures remain fundamentally anatomy-agnostic. While clinical diagnostics rely on organ-specific context, standard encoders apply a uniform, dense parameterization to all volumetric patches, and existing Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers gate on isolated local features without explicit access to the organ composition of the scan or crop. We propose Anatomy-Activated Mixture-of-Experts (A$^{2}$MoE), a framework that incorporates anatomical inductive biases within the model's computational path. A$^{2}$MoE introduces two key components: (1) a Histogram Representation Router (HRR) that conditions expert selection on global visual context and a predicted anatomical composition histogram, encouraging anatomy-dependent expert weighting; and (2) an Organ-Query Multi-Scale Projector (OQMSP) that utilizes learnable queries to extract organ-level embeddings for fine-grained alignment without requiring manual annotations at inference. By routing at the patch level rather than the token level, A$^{2}$MoE reduces routing complexity by orders of magnitude while satisfying load balancing by construction. Pre-trained on over 60,000 multi-phase CT scans, A$^{2}$MoE achieves state-of-the-art performance across segmentation, classification, and detection benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our anatomically grounded inductive biases support robust generalization to MRI and ultrasound, establishing a scalable foundation for medical representation learning. The code is available at https://github.com/gmum/A2MoE.