Normal-Abnormal Decoupling Memory for Medical Report Generation

Guosheng Zhao, Yan Yan, Zijian Zhao


Abstract
The automatic generation of medical reports plays a crucial role in clinical automation. In contrast to natural images, radiological images exhibit a high degree of similarity, while medical data are prone to data bias and complex noise, posing challenges for existing methods in capturing nuanced visual information. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel normal-abnormal semantic decoupling network that utilizes abnormal pattern memory. Different from directly optimizing the network using medical reports, we optimize visual extraction through the extraction of abnormal semantics from the reports. Moreover, we independently learn normal semantics based on abnormal semantics, ensuring that the optimization of the visual network remains unaffected by normal semantics learning. Then, we divided the words in the report into four parts: normal/abnormal sentences and normal/abnormal semantics, optimizing the network with distinct weights for each partition. The two semantic components, along with visual information, are seamlessly integrated to facilitate the generation of precise and coherent reports. This approach mitigates the impact of noisy normal semantics and reports. Moreover, we develop a novel encoder for abnormal pattern memory, which improves the network’s ability to detect anomalies by capturing and embedding the abnormal patterns of images in the visual encoder. This approach demonstrates excellent performance on the benchmark MIMIC-CXR, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.131
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1962–1977
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.131
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.131
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guosheng Zhao, Yan Yan, and Zijian Zhao. 2023. Normal-Abnormal Decoupling Memory for Medical Report Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1962–1977, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Normal-Abnormal Decoupling Memory for Medical Report Generation (Zhao et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.131.pdf