Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation

Findings (EMNLP) 2021 · An Yan, Zexue He, Xing Lu, Jiang Du, Eric Chang, Amilcare Gentili, Julian McAuley, Chun-Nan Hsu ·

Radiology report generation aims at generating descriptive text from radiology images automatically, which may present an opportunity to improve radiology reporting and interpretation. A typical setting consists of training encoder-decoder models on image-report pairs with a cross entropy loss, which struggles to generate informative sentences for clinical diagnoses since normal findings dominate the datasets. To tackle this challenge and encourage more clinically-accurate text outputs, we propose a novel weakly supervised contrastive loss for medical report generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method benefits from contrasting target reports with incorrect but semantically-close ones. It outperforms previous work on both clinical correctness and text generation metrics for two public benchmarks.