Learning to Generate Clinically Coherent Chest X-Ray Reports

Justin Lovelace, Bobak Mortazavi


Abstract
Automated radiology report generation has the potential to reduce the time clinicians spend manually reviewing radiographs and streamline clinical care. However, past work has shown that typical abstractive methods tend to produce fluent, but clinically incorrect radiology reports. In this work, we develop a radiology report generation model utilizing the transformer architecture that produces superior reports as measured by both standard language generation and clinical coherence metrics compared to competitive baselines. We then develop a method to differentiably extract clinical information from generated reports and utilize this differentiability to fine-tune our model to produce more clinically coherent reports.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.110
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1235–1243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.110
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.110
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Justin Lovelace and Bobak Mortazavi. 2020. Learning to Generate Clinically Coherent Chest X-Ray Reports. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1235–1243, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Generate Clinically Coherent Chest X-Ray Reports (Lovelace & Mortazavi, Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.110.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940177
Code
 justinlovelace/coherent-xray-report-generation
Data
CheXpertMS COCO