RadBARTsum: Domain Specific Adaption of Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Abstractive Radiology Report Summarization
This work addresses the need for doctors to quickly identify clinically significant findings in radiology reports, but it appears incremental as it adapts an existing model with domain-specific tweaks.
The study tackled the problem of summarizing radiology reports by proposing RadBARTsum, a domain-specific adaptation of the BART model, which improved performance through entity masking and fine-tuning, though no concrete numbers were provided in the abstract.
Radiology report summarization is a crucial task that can help doctors quickly identify clinically significant findings without the need to review detailed sections of reports. This study proposes RadBARTsum, a domain-specific and ontology facilitated adaptation of the BART model for abstractive radiology report summarization. The approach involves two main steps: 1) re-training the BART model on a large corpus of radiology reports using a novel entity masking strategy to improving biomedical domain knowledge learning, and 2) fine-tuning the model for the summarization task using the Findings and Background sections to predict the Impression section. Experiments are conducted using different masking strategies. Results show that the re-training process with domain knowledge facilitated masking improves performances consistently across various settings. This work contributes a domain-specific generative language model for radiology report summarization and a method for utilising medical knowledge to realise entity masking language model. The proposed approach demonstrates a promising direction of enhancing the efficiency of language models by deepening its understanding of clinical knowledge in radiology reports.