DART: Disease-aware Image-Text Alignment and Self-correcting Re-alignment for Trustworthy Radiology Report Generation
This addresses the need for trustworthy radiology reports to reduce time-consuming tasks for medical professionals, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing retrieval and refinement methods.
The study tackled the problem of improving accuracy in automatic radiology report generation by ensuring disease-relevant alignment between X-ray images and reports, achieving state-of-the-art results on two benchmarks with enhanced clinical efficacy metrics.
The automatic generation of radiology reports has emerged as a promising solution to reduce a time-consuming task and accurately capture critical disease-relevant findings in X-ray images. Previous approaches for radiology report generation have shown impressive performance. However, there remains significant potential to improve accuracy by ensuring that retrieved reports contain disease-relevant findings similar to those in the X-ray images and by refining generated reports. In this study, we propose a Disease-aware image-text Alignment and self-correcting Re-alignment for Trustworthy radiology report generation (DART) framework. In the first stage, we generate initial reports based on image-to-text retrieval with disease-matching, embedding both images and texts in a shared embedding space through contrastive learning. This approach ensures the retrieval of reports with similar disease-relevant findings that closely align with the input X-ray images. In the second stage, we further enhance the initial reports by introducing a self-correction module that re-aligns them with the X-ray images. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on two widely used benchmarks, surpassing previous approaches in both report generation and clinical efficacy metrics, thereby enhancing the trustworthiness of radiology reports.