Radiology Report Generation for Chest X-ray Images using Transformers

Abstract

Recent advancements in transformers exploited computer vision problems which results in state-of-the-art models. Transformer-based models in various sequence prediction tasks such as language translation, sentiment classification, and caption generation have shown remarkable performance. Auto report generation scenarios in medical imaging through caption generation models is one of the applied scenarios for language models and have strong social impact. In these models, convolution neural networks have been used as encoder to gain spatial information and recurrent neural networks are used as decoder to generate caption or medical report. However, using transformer architecture as encoder and decoder in caption or report writing task is still unexplored. In this research, we explored the effect of losing spatial biasness information in encoder by using pre-trained vanilla image transformer architecture and combine it with different pre-trained language transformers as decoder. In order to evaluate the proposed methodology, the Indiana University Chest X-Rays dataset is used where ablation study is also conducted with respect to different evaluations. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed methodology has represented remarkable performance when compared with existing techniques in terms of different performance parameters.