RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease
  Progression Reasoning
Wenjun Hou Yi Cheng Kaishuai Xu Wenjie Li Jiang Liu
Automating radiology report generation can significantly alleviate
radiologists' workloads. Previous research has primarily focused on realizing
highly concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that
determine the severity of diseases (e.g., small pleural effusion). Since
incorrect attributes will lead to imprecise radiology reports, strengthening
the generation process with precise attribute modeling becomes necessary.
Additionally, the temporal information contained in the historical records,
which is crucial in evaluating a patient's current condition (e.g., heart size
is unchanged), has also been largely disregarded. To address these issues, we
propose RECAP, which generates precise and accurate radiology reports via
dynamic disease progression reasoning. Specifically, RECAP first predicts the
observations and progressions (i.e., spatiotemporal information) given two
consecutive radiographs. It then combines the historical records,
spatiotemporal information, and radiographs for report generation, where a
disease progression graph and dynamic progression reasoning mechanism are
devised to accurately select the attributes of each observation and
progression. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets
demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.