CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERT
This work addresses the need for accurate and scalable labeling in medical imaging, which is crucial for training large-scale models in radiology, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational advancement.
The authors tackled the problem of extracting labels from radiology reports for training medical imaging models by introducing CheXbert, a BERT-based approach that combines rule-based systems and expert annotations, achieving statistically significant outperformance over the previous best rules-based labeler on a large chest x-ray dataset.
The extraction of labels from radiology text reports enables large-scale training of medical imaging models. Existing approaches to report labeling typically rely either on sophisticated feature engineering based on medical domain knowledge or manual annotations by experts. In this work, we introduce a BERT-based approach to medical image report labeling that exploits both the scale of available rule-based systems and the quality of expert annotations. We demonstrate superior performance of a biomedically pretrained BERT model first trained on annotations of a rule-based labeler and then finetuned on a small set of expert annotations augmented with automated backtranslation. We find that our final model, CheXbert, is able to outperform the previous best rules-based labeler with statistical significance, setting a new SOTA for report labeling on one of the largest datasets of chest x-rays.