Utilizing Longitudinal Chest X-Rays and Reports to Pre-Fill Radiology Reports

Despite the reduction in turn-around times in radiology reports with the use of speech recognition software, persistent communication errors can significantly impact the interpretation of the radiology report. Pre-filling a radiology report holds promise in mitigating reporting errors, and despite efforts in the literature to generate medical reports, there exists a lack of approaches that exploit the longitudinal nature of patient visit records in the MIMIC-CXR dataset. To address this gap, we propose to use longitudinal multi-modal data, i.e., previous patient visit CXR, current visit CXR, and previous visit report, to pre-fill the 'findings' section of a current patient visit report. We first gathered the longitudinal visit information for 26,625 patients from the MIMIC-CXR dataset and created a new dataset called Longitudinal-MIMIC. With this new dataset, a transformer-based model was trained to capture the information from longitudinal patient visit records containing multi-modal data (CXR images + reports) via a cross-attention-based multi-modal fusion module and a hierarchical memory-driven decoder. In contrast to previous work that only uses current visit data as input to train a model, our work exploits the longitudinal information available to pre-fill the 'findings' section of radiology reports. Experiments show that our approach outperforms several recent approaches by >=3% on F1 score, and >=2% for BLEU-4, METEOR and ROUGE-L respectively. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.