RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning

Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Wenjie Li, Jiang Liu


Abstract
Automating radiology report generation can significantly alleviate radiologists’ workloads. Previous research has primarily focused on realizing highly concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that determine the severity of diseases (e.g., small pleural effusion). Since incorrect attributes will lead to imprecise radiology reports, strengthening the generation process with precise attribute modeling becomes necessary. Additionally, the temporal information contained in the historical records, which is crucial in evaluating a patient’s current condition (e.g., heart size is unchanged), has also been largely disregarded. To address these issues, we propose RECAP, which generates precise and accurate radiology reports via dynamic disease progression reasoning. Specifically, RECAP first predicts the observations and progressions (i.e., spatiotemporal information) given two consecutive radiographs. It then combines the historical records, spatiotemporal information, and radiographs for report generation, where a disease progression graph and dynamic progression reasoning mechanism are devised to accurately select the attributes of each observation and progression. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.140
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:
2134–2147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.140
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.140
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Wenjie Li, and Jiang Liu. 2023. RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2134–2147, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning (Hou et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.140.pdf