DeltaNet:Conditional Medical Report Generation for COVID-19 Diagnosis
This addresses the burden of report writing for radiologists during high-volume situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing image captioning and retrieval methods.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing radiologists' workload by automatically generating medical reports for COVID-19 diagnosis, proposing DeltaNet which uses a conditional generation process based on retrieved historical reports and image differences, and reports that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on a COVID-19 dataset.
Fast screening and diagnosis are critical in COVID-19 patient treatment. In addition to the gold standard RT-PCR, radiological imaging like X-ray and CT also works as an important means in patient screening and follow-up. However, due to the excessive number of patients, writing reports becomes a heavy burden for radiologists. To reduce the workload of radiologists, we propose DeltaNet to generate medical reports automatically. Different from typical image captioning approaches that generate reports with an encoder and a decoder, DeltaNet applies a conditional generation process. In particular, given a medical image, DeltaNet employs three steps to generate a report: 1) first retrieving related medical reports, i.e., the historical reports from the same or similar patients; 2) then comparing retrieved images and current image to find the differences; 3) finally generating a new report to accommodate identified differences based on the conditional report. We evaluate DeltaNet on a COVID-19 dataset, where DeltaNet outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Besides COVID-19, the proposed DeltaNet can be applied to other diseases as well. We validate its generalization capabilities on the public IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR datasets for chest-related diseases. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/LX-doctorAI1/DeltaNet}.