Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation

An Yan, Zexue He, Xing Lu, Jiang Du, Eric Chang, Amilcare Gentili, Julian McAuley, Chun-Nan Hsu


Abstract
Radiology report generation aims at generating descriptive text from radiology images automatically, which may present an opportunity to improve radiology reporting and interpretation. A typical setting consists of training encoder-decoder models on image-report pairs with a cross entropy loss, which struggles to generate informative sentences for clinical diagnoses since normal findings dominate the datasets. To tackle this challenge and encourage more clinically-accurate text outputs, we propose a novel weakly supervised contrastive loss for medical report generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method benefits from contrasting target reports with incorrect but semantically-close ones. It outperforms previous work on both clinical correctness and text generation metrics for two public benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.336
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4009–4015
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.336
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.336
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
An Yan, Zexue He, Xing Lu, Jiang Du, Eric Chang, Amilcare Gentili, Julian McAuley, and Chun-Nan Hsu. 2021. Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4009–4015, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation (Yan et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.336.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.336.mp4
Data
CheXpertMIMIC-CXR