Learning to Summarize Radiology Findings
Yuhao Zhang, Daisy Yi Ding, Tianpei Qian, Christopher D. Manning, Curtis P. Langlotz
Abstract
The Impression section of a radiology report summarizes crucial radiology findings in natural language and plays a central role in communicating these findings to physicians. However, the process of generating impressions by summarizing findings is time-consuming for radiologists and prone to errors. We propose to automate the generation of radiology impressions with neural sequence-to-sequence learning. We further propose a customized neural model for this task which learns to encode the study background information and use this information to guide the decoding process. On a large dataset of radiology reports collected from actual hospital studies, our model outperforms existing non-neural and neural baselines under the ROUGE metrics. In a blind experiment, a board-certified radiologist indicated that 67% of sampled system summaries are at least as good as the corresponding human-written summaries, suggesting significant clinical validity. To our knowledge our work represents the first attempt in this direction.- Anthology ID:
- W18-5623
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Venue:
- Louhi
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 204–213
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-5623
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W18-5623
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuhao Zhang, Daisy Yi Ding, Tianpei Qian, Christopher D. Manning, and Curtis P. Langlotz. 2018. Learning to Summarize Radiology Findings. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, pages 204–213, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Learning to Summarize Radiology Findings (Zhang et al., Louhi 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/W18-5623.pdf
- Code
- yuhaozhang/summarize-radiology-findings