Radiology report summarization is a growing area of research. Given the Findings and/or Background sections of a radiology report, the goal is to generate a summary (called an Impression section) that highlights the key observations and conclusions of the radiology study. Recent efforts have released systems that achieve promising performance as measured by widely used summarization metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE. However, the research area of radiology report summarization currently faces two important limitations. First, most of the results are reported on private datasets. This limitation prevents the ability to reproduce results and fairly compare different systems and solutions. Secondly, to the best of our knowledge, most research is carried out on chest X-rays. To palliate these two limitations, we propose a radiology report summarization (RadSum) challenge on i) a new dataset of eleven different modalities and anatomies pairs based on the MIMIC-III database ii) a multimodal report summarization dataset based on MIMIC-CXR enhanced with a brand-new test-set from Stanford Hospital. In total, we received 112 submissions across 11 teams.

There is a growing need to model interactions between data modalities (e.g., vision, language) — both to improve AI predictions on existing tasks and to enable new applications. In the recent field of multimodal medical AI, integrating multiple modalities has gained widespread popularity as multimodal models have proven to improve performance, robustness, require less training samples and add complementary information. To improve technical reproducibility and transparency for multimodal medical tasks as well as speed up progress across medical AI, we present ViLMedic, a Vision-and-Language medical library. As of 2022, the library contains a dozen reference implementations replicating the state-of-the-art results for problems that range from medical visual question answering and radiology report generation to multimodal representation learning on widely adopted medical datasets. In addition, ViLMedic hosts a model-zoo with more than twenty pretrained models for the above tasks designed to be extensible by researchers but also simple for practitioners. Ultimately, we hope our reproducible pipelines can enable clinical translation and create real impact. The library is available at https://github.com/jbdel/vilmedic.

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.