Christian Bluethgen


2023

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RadAdapt: Radiology Report Summarization via Lightweight Domain Adaptation of Large Language Models
Dave Van Veen | Cara Van Uden | Maayane Attias | Anuj Pareek | Christian Bluethgen | Malgorzata Polacin | Wah Chiu | Jean-Benoit Delbrouck | Juan Zambrano Chaves | Curtis Langlotz | Akshay Chaudhari | John Pauly
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

We systematically investigate lightweight strategies to adapt large language models (LLMs) for the task of radiology report summarization (RRS). Specifically, we focus on domain adaptation via pretraining (on natural language, biomedical text, or clinical text) and via discrete prompting or parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results consistently achieve best performance by maximally adapting to the task via pretraining on clinical text and fine-tuning on RRS examples. Importantly, this method fine-tunes a mere 0.32% of parameters throughout the model, in contrast to end-to-end fine-tuning (100% of parameters). Additionally, we study the effect of in-context examples and out-of-distribution (OOD) training before concluding with a radiologist reader study and qualitative analysis. Our findings highlight the importance of domain adaptation in RRS and provide valuable insights toward developing effective natural language processing solutions for clinical tasks.

2022

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Improving the Factual Correctness of Radiology Report Generation with Semantic Rewards
Jean-Benoit Delbrouck | Pierre Chambon | Christian Bluethgen | Emily Tsai | Omar Almusa | Curtis Langlotz
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. These systems have achieved promising performance as measured by widely used NLG metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr. However, the current systems face important limitations. First, they present an increased complexity in architecture that offers only marginal improvements on NLG metrics. Secondly, these systems that achieve high performance on these metrics are not always factually complete or consistent due to both inadequate training and evaluation. Recent studies have shown the systems can be substantially improved by using new methods encouraging 1) the generation of domain entities consistent with the reference and 2) describing these entities in inferentially consistent ways. So far, these methods rely on weakly-supervised approaches (rule-based) and named entity recognition systems that are not specific to the chest X-ray domain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method, the RadGraph reward, to further improve the factual completeness and correctness of generated radiology reports. More precisely, we leverage the RadGraph dataset containing annotated chest X-ray reports with entities and relations between entities. On two open radiology report datasets, our system substantially improves the scores up to 14.2% and 25.3% on metrics evaluating the factual correctness and completeness of reports.