Steven Q. H. Truong

Ta Duc Huy, Nguyen Anh Tu, Tran Hoang Vu et al.

Existing medical text datasets usually take the form of question and answer pairs that support the task of natural language generation, but lacking the composite annotations of the medical terms. In this study, we publish a Vietnamese dataset of medical questions from patients with sentence-level and entity-level annotations for the Intent Classification and Named Entity Recognition tasks. The tag sets for two tasks are in medical domain and can facilitate the development of task-oriented healthcare chatbots with better comprehension of queries from patients. We train baseline models for the two tasks and propose a simple self-supervised training strategy with span-noise modelling that substantially improves the performance. Dataset and code will be published at https://github.com/tadeephuy/ViMQ

Eva Prakash, Maayane Attias, Pierre Chambon et al.

Objective: To enhance automated de-identification of radiology reports by scaling transformer-based models through extensive training datasets and benchmarking performance against commercial cloud vendor systems for protected health information (PHI) detection. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, we built upon a state-of-the-art, transformer-based, PHI de-identification pipeline by fine-tuning on two large annotated radiology corpora from Stanford University, encompassing chest X-ray, chest CT, abdomen/pelvis CT, and brain MR reports and introducing an additional PHI category (AGE) into the architecture. Model performance was evaluated on test sets from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) for token-level PHI detection. We further assessed (1) the stability of synthetic PHI generation using a "hide-in-plain-sight" method and (2) performance against commercial systems. Precision, recall, and F1 scores were computed across all PHI categories. Results: Our model achieved overall F1 scores of 0.973 on the Penn dataset and 0.996 on the Stanford dataset, outperforming or maintaining the previous state-of-the-art model performance. Synthetic PHI evaluation showed consistent detectability (overall F1: 0.959 [0.958-0.960]) across 50 independently de-identified Penn datasets. Our model outperformed all vendor systems on synthetic Penn reports (overall F1: 0.960 vs. 0.632-0.754). Discussion: Large-scale, multimodal training improved cross-institutional generalization and robustness. Synthetic PHI generation preserved data utility while ensuring privacy. Conclusion: A transformer-based de-identification model trained on diverse radiology datasets outperforms prior academic and commercial systems in PHI detection and establishes a new benchmark for secure clinical text processing.

Tran Bao Sam, Hung Vu, Dao Trung Kien et al.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) has become vital in medical imaging, but automated systems often struggle to replicate the nuanced process of clinical interpretation. Expert diagnosis requires a comprehensive analysis of how abnormalities relate to each other across various views and time points, but current multi-view CADx methods frequently overlook these complex dependencies. Specifically, they fail to model the crucial relationships within a single view and the dynamic changes lesions exhibit across different views. This limitation, combined with the common challenge of incomplete data, greatly reduces their predictive reliability. To address these gaps, we reframe the diagnostic task as one of relationship modeling and propose GIIM, a novel graph-based approach. Our framework is uniquely designed to simultaneously capture both critical intra-view dependencies between abnormalities and inter-view dynamics. Furthermore, it ensures diagnostic robustness by incorporating specific techniques to effectively handle missing data, a common clinical issue. We demonstrate the generality of this approach through extensive evaluations on diverse imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and mammography. The results confirm that our GIIM model significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy and robustness over existing methods, establishing a more effective framework for future CADx systems.

Abdullah F. Al-Battal, Soan T. M. Duong, Van Ha Tang et al.

Multi-phase computed tomography (CT) scans use contrast agents to highlight different anatomical structures within the body to improve the probability of identifying and detecting anatomical structures of interest and abnormalities such as liver lesions. Yet, detecting these lesions remains a challenging task as these lesions vary significantly in their size, shape, texture, and contrast with respect to surrounding tissue. Therefore, radiologists need to have an extensive experience to be able to identify and detect these lesions. Segmentation-based neural networks can assist radiologists with this task. Current state-of-the-art lesion segmentation networks use the encoder-decoder design paradigm based on the UNet architecture where the multi-phase CT scan volume is fed to the network as a multi-channel input. Although this approach utilizes information from all the phases and outperform single-phase segmentation networks, we demonstrate that their performance is not optimal and can be further improved by incorporating the learning from models trained on each single-phase individually. Our approach comprises three stages. The first stage identifies the regions within the liver where there might be lesions at three different scales (4, 8, and 16 mm). The second stage includes the main segmentation model trained using all the phases as well as a segmentation model trained on each of the phases individually. The third stage uses the multi-phase CT volumes together with the predictions from each of the segmentation models to generate the final segmentation map. Overall, our approach improves relative liver lesion segmentation performance by 1.6% while reducing performance variability across subjects by 8% when compared to the current state-of-the-art models.

Jianshu Ji, Qinlong Wang, Kristina Toutanova et al.

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems strive to correct both global errors in word order and usage, and local errors in spelling and inflection. Further developing upon recent work on neural machine translation, we propose a new hybrid neural model with nested attention layers for GEC. Experiments show that the new model can effectively correct errors of both types by incorporating word and character-level information,and that the model significantly outperforms previous neural models for GEC as measured on the standard CoNLL-14 benchmark dataset. Further analysis also shows that the superiority of the proposed model can be largely attributed to the use of the nested attention mechanism, which has proven particularly effective in correcting local errors that involve small edits in orthography.