When Radiology Report Generation Meets Knowledge Graph

Authors

  • Yixiao Zhang Johns Hopkins University
  • Xiaosong Wang Nvidia
  • Ziyue Xu Nvidia
  • Qihang Yu Johns Hopkins University
  • Alan Yuille Johns Hopkins University
  • Daguang Xu Nvidia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i07.6989

Abstract

Automatic radiology report generation has been an attracting research problem towards computer-aided diagnosis to alleviate the workload of doctors in recent years. Deep learning techniques for natural image captioning are successfully adapted to generating radiology reports. However, radiology image reporting is different from the natural image captioning task in two aspects: 1) the accuracy of positive disease keyword mentions is critical in radiology image reporting in comparison to the equivalent importance of every single word in a natural image caption; 2) the evaluation of reporting quality should focus more on matching the disease keywords and their associated attributes instead of counting the occurrence of N-gram. Based on these concerns, we propose to utilize a pre-constructed graph embedding module (modeled with a graph convolutional neural network) on multiple disease findings to assist the generation of reports in this work. The incorporation of knowledge graph allows for dedicated feature learning for each disease finding and the relationship modeling between them. In addition, we proposed a new evaluation metric for radiology image reporting with the assistance of the same composed graph. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the methods integrated with the proposed graph embedding module on a publicly accessible dataset (IU-RR) of chest radiographs compared with previous approaches using both the conventional evaluation metrics commonly adopted for image captioning and our proposed ones.

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Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Zhang, Y., Wang, X., Xu, Z., Yu, Q., Yuille, A., & Xu, D. (2020). When Radiology Report Generation Meets Knowledge Graph. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(07), 12910-12917. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i07.6989

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Section

AAAI Technical Track: Vision