Mingjie Li

Mingjie Li, Wenjia Cai, Karin Verspoor et al.

Automatic generation of ophthalmic reports using data-driven neural networks has great potential in clinical practice. When writing a report, ophthalmologists make inferences with prior clinical knowledge. This knowledge has been neglected in prior medical report generation methods. To endow models with the capability of incorporating expert knowledge, we propose a Cross-modal clinical Graph Transformer (CGT) for ophthalmic report generation (ORG), in which clinical relation triples are injected into the visual features as prior knowledge to drive the decoding procedure. However, two major common Knowledge Noise (KN) issues may affect models' effectiveness. 1) Existing general biomedical knowledge bases such as the UMLS may not align meaningfully to the specific context and language of the report, limiting their utility for knowledge injection. 2) Incorporating too much knowledge may divert the visual features from their correct meaning. To overcome these limitations, we design an automatic information extraction scheme based on natural language processing to obtain clinical entities and relations directly from in-domain training reports. Given a set of ophthalmic images, our CGT first restores a sub-graph from the clinical graph and injects the restored triples into visual features. Then visible matrix is employed during the encoding procedure to limit the impact of knowledge. Finally, reports are predicted by the encoded cross-modal features via a Transformer decoder. Extensive experiments on the large-scale FFA-IR benchmark demonstrate that the proposed CGT is able to outperform previous benchmark methods and achieve state-of-the-art performances.

Bingqian Lin, Zicong Chen, Mingjie Li et al.

Medical artificial general intelligence (MAGI) enables one foundation model to solve different medical tasks, which is very practical in the medical domain. It can significantly reduce the requirement of large amounts of task-specific data by sufficiently sharing medical knowledge among different tasks. However, due to the challenges of designing strongly generalizable models with limited and complex medical data, most existing approaches tend to develop task-specific models. To take a step towards MAGI, we propose a new paradigm called Medical-knOwledge-enhanced mulTimOdal pretRaining (MOTOR). In MOTOR, we combine two kinds of basic medical knowledge, i.e., general and specific knowledge, in a complementary manner to boost the general pretraining process. As a result, the foundation model with comprehensive basic knowledge can learn compact representations from pretraining radiographic data for better cross-modal alignment. MOTOR unifies the understanding and generation, which are two kinds of core intelligence of an AI system, into a single medical foundation model, to flexibly handle more diverse medical tasks. To enable a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical multimodal benchmark including a wide range of downstream tasks, such as chest x-ray report generation and medical visual question answering. Extensive experiments on our benchmark show that MOTOR obtains promising results through simple task-oriented adaptation. The visualization shows that the injected knowledge successfully highlights key information in the medical data, demonstrating the excellent interpretability of MOTOR. Our MOTOR successfully mimics the human practice of fulfilling a "medical student" to accelerate the process of becoming a "specialist". We believe that our work makes a significant stride in realizing MAGI.