Timely generation of radiology reports and diagnoses is a challenge worldwide due to the enormous number of cases and shortage of radiology specialists. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Vision Language BART (KGVL-BART) model that takes as input two chest X-ray images- one frontal and the other lateral- along with tags which are diagnostic keywords, and outputs a report with the patient-specific findings. Our system development effort is divided into 3 stages: i) construction of the Chest X-ray KG (referred to as chestX-KG), ii) image feature extraction, and iii) training a KGVL-BART model using the visual, text, and KG data. The dataset we use is the well-known Indiana University Chest X-ray reports with the train, validation, and test split of 3025 instances, 300 instances, and 500 instances respectively. We construct a Chest X-Ray knowledge graph from these reports by extracting entity1-relation-entity2 triples; the triples get extracted by a rule-based tool of our own. Constructed KG is verified by two experienced radiologists (with experience of 30 years and 8 years, respectively). We demonstrate that our model- KGVL-BART- outperforms State-of-the-Art transformer-based models on standard NLG scoring metrics. We also include a qualitative evaluation of our system by experienced radiologist (with experience of 30 years) on the test data, which showed that 73% of the reports generated were fully correct, only 5.5% are completely wrong and 21.5% have important missing details though overall correct. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first system to make use of multi-modality and domain knowledge to generate X-ray reports automatically.

In conventional radiology practice, the radiologist dictates the diagnosis to the transcriptionist, who then prepares a preliminary formatted report referring to the notes, after which the radiologist reviews the report, corrects the errors, and signs off. This workflow is prone to delay and error. In this paper, we report our work on automatic radiology report generation from radiologists’ dictation, which is in collaboration with a startup about to become Unicorn. A major contribution of our work is the set of knowledge graphs (KGs) of ten abdominal organs- Liver, Kidney, Gallbladder, Uterus, Urinary bladder, Ovary, Pancreas, Prostate, Biliary Tree, and Bowel. Our method for constructing these KGs relies on extracting entity1-relation-entity2 triplets from a large collection (about 10,000) of free-text radiology reports. The quality and coverage of the KGs are verified by two experienced radiologists (practicing for the last 30 years and 8 years, respectively). The dictation of the radiologist is automatically converted to what is called a pathological description which is the clinical description of the findings of the radiologist during ultrasonography (USG). Our knowledge-enhanced deep learning model improves the reported BLEU-3, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and CIDEr scores of the pathological description generation by 2%, 4%, 2% and 2% respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at representing the abdominal organs in the form of knowledge graphs and utilising these graphs for the automatic generation of USG reports. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has been made available to the beta users, i.e., radiologists of reputed hospitals, for testing and evaluation. Our solution guarantees report generation within 30 seconds of running a scan.

Manual radiology report generation is a time-consuming task. First, radiologists prepare brief notes while carefully examining the imaging report. Then, radiologists or their secretaries create a full-text report that describes the findings by referring to the notes. Automatic radiology report generation is the primary objective of this research. The central part of automatic radiology report generation is generating the finding section (main body of the report) from the radiologists’ notes. In this research, we suggest a knowledge graph (KG) enhanced radiology text generator that can provide additional domain-specific information. Our approach uses a KG-BART model to generate a description of clinical findings (referred to as pathological description) from radiologists’ brief notes. We have constructed a parallel dataset of radiologists’ notes and corresponding pathological descriptions to train the KG-BART model. Our findings demonstrate that, compared to the BART-large and T5-large models, the BLEU-2 score of the pathological descriptions generated by our approach is raised by 4% and 9%, and the ROUGE-L score by 2% and 2%, respectively. Our analysis shows that the KG-BART model for radiology text generation outperforms the T5-large model. Furthermore, we apply our proposed radiology text generator for whole radiology report generation.