Zeyi Hou

Mengwei Wang, Ruixin Yan, Zeyi Hou et al.

In the field of medical image analysis, the scarcity of Chinese chest X-ray report datasets has hindered the development of technology for generating Chinese chest X-ray reports. On one hand, the construction of a Chinese chest X-ray report dataset is limited by the time-consuming and costly process of accurate expert disease annotation. On the other hand, a single natural language generation metric is commonly used to evaluate the similarity between generated and ground-truth reports, while the clinical accuracy and effectiveness of the generated reports rely on an accurate disease labeler (classifier). To address the issues, this study proposes a disease labeler tailored for the generation of Chinese chest X-ray reports. This labeler leverages a dual BERT architecture to handle diagnostic reports and clinical information separately and constructs a hierarchical label learning algorithm based on the affiliation between diseases and body parts to enhance text classification performance. Utilizing this disease labeler, a Chinese chest X-ray report dataset comprising 51,262 report samples was established. Finally, experiments and analyses were conducted on a subset of expert-annotated Chinese chest X-ray reports, validating the effectiveness of the proposed disease labeler.

Zeyi Hou, Zeqiang Wei, Ruixin Yan et al.

Recent advances in automated radiology report generation from chest X-rays using deep learning algorithms have the potential to significantly reduce the arduous workload of radiologists. However, due to the inherent massive data bias in radiology images, where abnormalities are typically subtle and sparsely distributed, existing methods often produce fluent yet medically inaccurate reports, limiting their applicability in clinical practice. To address this issue effectively, we propose a Semantically Informed Salient Regions-guided (SISRNet) report generation method. Specifically, our approach explicitly identifies salient regions with medically critical characteristics using fine-grained cross-modal semantics. Then, SISRNet systematically focuses on these high-information regions during both image modeling and report generation, effectively capturing subtle abnormal findings, mitigating the negative impact of data bias, and ultimately generating clinically accurate reports. Compared to its peers, SISRNet demonstrates superior performance on widely used IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR datasets.