A Novel Deep Learning Model for Medical Report Generation by Inter-Intra Information Calibration

Automatic generation of medical reports can provide diagnostic assistance to doctors and reduce their workload. To improve the quality of the generated medical reports, injecting auxiliary information through knowledge graphs or templates into the model is widely adopted in previous methods. However, they suffer from two problems: 1) The injected external information is limited in amount and difficult to adequately meet the information needs of medical report generation in content. 2) The injected external information increases the complexity of model and is hard to be reasonably integrated into the generation process of medical reports. Therefore, we propose an Information Calibrated Transformer (ICT) to address the above issues. First, we design a Precursor-information Enhancement Module (PEM), which can effectively extract numerous inter-intra report features from the datasets as the auxiliary information without external injection. And the auxiliary information can be dynamically updated with the training process. Secondly, a combination mode, which consists of PEM and our proposed Information Calibration Attention Module (ICA), is designed and embedded into ICT. In this method, the auxiliary information extracted from PEM is flexibly injected into ICT and the increment of model parameters is small. The comprehensive evaluations validate that the ICT is not only superior to previous methods in the X-Ray datasets, IU-X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR, but also successfully be extended to a CT COVID-19 dataset COV-CTR.