Automated Generation of Accurate and Fluent Medical X-ray Reports

Abstract

Our paper focuses on automating the generation of medical reports from chest X-ray image inputs, a critical yet time-consuming task for radiologists. Unlike existing medical re-port generation efforts that tend to produce human-readable reports, we aim to generate medical reports that are both fluent and clinically accurate. This is achieved by our fully differentiable and end-to-end paradigm containing three complementary modules: taking the chest X-ray images and clinical his-tory document of patients as inputs, our classification module produces an internal check-list of disease-related topics, referred to as enriched disease embedding; the embedding representation is then passed to our transformer-based generator, giving rise to the medical reports; meanwhile, our generator also pro-duces the weighted embedding representation, which is fed to our interpreter to ensure consistency with respect to disease-related topics.Our approach achieved promising results on commonly-used metrics concerning language fluency and clinical accuracy. Moreover, noticeable performance gains are consistently ob-served when additional input information is available, such as the clinical document and extra scans of different views.