Recent advances in deep learning have enabled researchers to explore tasks at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, such as image captioning, visual question answering, visual dialogue, and visual language navigation. Taking inspiration from image captioning, the task of radiology report generation aims at automatically generating radiology reports by having a comprehensive understanding of medical images. However, automatically generating radiology reports from medical images is a challenging task due to the complexity, diversity, and nature of medical images. In this paper, we outline the design of a robust radiology report generation system by integrating different modules and highlighting best practices drawing upon lessons from our past work and also from relevant studies in the literature. We also discuss the impact of integrating different components to form a single integrated system. We believe that these best practices, when implemented, could improve automatic radiology report generation, augment radiologists in decision making, and expedite diagnostic workflow, in turn improve healthcare and save human lives.

Medical imaging has been used for diagnosis of various conditions, making it one of the most powerful resources for effective patient care. Due to widespread availability, low cost, and low radiation, chest X-ray is one of the most sought after radiology examination for the diagnosis of various thoracic diseases. Due to advancements in medical imaging technologies and increasing patient load, current radiology workflow faces various challenges including increasing backlogs, working long hours, and increase in diagnostic errors. An automated computer-aided diagnosis system that can interpret chest X-rays to augment radiologists by providing actionable insights has potential to provide second opinion to radiologists, highlight relevant regions in the image, in turn expediting clinical workflow, reducing diagnostic errors, and improving patient care. In this study, we applied a novel architecture augmenting the DenseNet121 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with multi-head self-attention mechanism using transformer, namely SA-DenseNet121, that can identify multiple thoracic diseases in chest X-rays. We conducted experiments on four of the largest chest X-ray datasets, namely, ChestX-ray14, CheXpert, MIMIC-CXR-JPG, and IU-CXR. Experimental results in terms of area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC-ROC) shows that augmenting CNN with self-attention has potential in diagnosing different thoracic diseases from chest X-rays. The proposed methodology has the potential to support the reading workflow, improve efficiency, and reduce diagnostic errors.

Chest X-ray is an essential diagnostic tool in the identification of chest diseases given its high sensitivity to pathological abnormalities in the lungs. However, image-driven diagnosis is still challenging due to heterogeneity in size and location of pathology, as well as visual similarities and co-occurrence of separate pathology. Since disease-related regions often occupy a relatively small portion of diagnostic images, classification models based on traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are adversely affected given their locality bias. While CNNs were previously augmented with attention maps or spatial masks to guide focus on potentially critical regions, learning localization guidance under heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of pathology is challenging. To improve multi-label classification performance, here we propose a novel method, HydraViT, that synergistically combines a transformer backbone with a multi-branch output module with learned weighting. The transformer backbone enhances sensitivity to long-range context in X-ray images, while using the self-attention mechanism to adaptively focus on task-critical regions. The multi-branch output module dedicates an independent branch to each disease label to attain robust learning across separate disease classes, along with an aggregated branch across labels to maintain sensitivity to co-occurrence relationships among pathology. Experiments demonstrate that, on average, HydraViT outperforms competing attention-guided methods by 1.2%, region-guided methods by 1.4%, and semantic-guided methods by 1.0% in multi-label classification performance.

Chest X-ray images are one of the most common medical diagnosis techniques to identify different thoracic diseases. However, identification of pathologies in X-ray images requires skilled manpower and are often cited as a time-consuming task with varied level of interpretation, particularly in cases where the identification of disease only by images is difficult for human eyes. With recent achievements of deep learning in image classification, its application in disease diagnosis has been widely explored. This research project presents a multi-label disease diagnosis model of chest x-rays. Using Dense Convolutional Neural Network (DenseNet), the diagnosis system was able to obtain high classification predictions. The model obtained the highest AUC score of 0.896 for condition Cardiomegaly and the lowest AUC score for Nodule, 0.655. The model also localized the parts of the chest radiograph that indicated the presence of each pathology using GRADCAM, thus contributing to the model interpretability of a deep learning algorithm.

Chest X-Ray (CXR) is one of the most common diagnostic techniques used in everyday clinical practice all around the world. We hereby present a work which intends to investigate and analyse the use of Deep Learning (DL) techniques to extract information from such images and allow to classify them, trying to keep our methodology as general as possible and possibly also usable in a real world scenario without much effort, in the future. To move in this direction, we trained several beta-Variational Autoencoder (beta-VAE) models on the CheXpert dataset, one of the largest publicly available collection of labeled CXR images; from these models, latent features have been extracted and used to train other Machine Learning models, able to classify the original images from the features extracted by the beta-VAE. Lastly, tree-based models have been combined together in ensemblings to improve the results without the necessity of further training or models engineering. Expecting some drop in pure performance with the respect to state of the art classification specific models, we obtained encouraging results, which show the viability of our approach and the usability of the high level features extracted by the autoencoders for classification tasks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide humans great relief from numerous repetitive tasks, with automation increasing productivity. Furthermore, AI powered machines and devices are fast and efficient: learning, predicting, and deciding with superhuman accuracy. Concurrently, the use cases for augmentative AI are expanding, with numerous industries and organizations looking to tap into the potential. This is clearly the situation in two key Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) areas: neuroscience and radiology. In both areas, radiologists, MRI technicians and physicians must spend hours sifting through images, searching for markers and anomalies that may spur a disease diagnosis.

Thoracic diseases are very serious health problems that plague a large number of people. Chest X-ray is currently one of the most popular methods to diagnose thoracic diseases, playing an important role in the healthcare workflow. However, reading the chest X-ray images and giving an accurate diagnosis remain challenging tasks for expert radiologists. With the success of deep learning in computer vision, a growing number of deep neural network architectures were applied to chest X-ray image classification. However, most of the previous deep neural network classifiers were based on deterministic architectures which are usually very noise-sensitive and are likely to aggravate the overfitting issue. In this paper, to make a deep architecture more robust to noise and to reduce overfitting, we propose using deep generative classifiers to automatically diagnose thorax diseases from the chest X-ray images. Unlike the traditional deterministic classifier, a deep generative classifier has a distribution middle layer in the deep neural network. A sampling layer then draws a random sample from the distribution layer and input it to the following layer for classification. The classifier is generative because the class label is generated from samples of a related distribution. Through training the model with a certain amount of randomness, the deep generative classifiers are expected to be robust to noise and can reduce overfitting and then achieve good performances. We implemented our deep generative classifiers based on a number of well-known deterministic neural network architectures, and tested our models on the chest X-ray14 dataset. The results demonstrated the superiority of deep generative classifiers compared with the corresponding deep deterministic classifiers.

Chest Xrays are used to diagnose multiple diseases. From pneumonia to lung nodules multiple diseases can be diagnosed using just this one modality using Deep Learning. Chest Xray 14 dataset was recently released by NIH which has over 90000 Xray plates tagged with 14 diseases or being normal. This has started a race to make Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Systems which can learn discerning thoracic diseases from Xrays. If you happen to be following the development following the release of the dataset, you would have noticed research coming out from various research labs on this dataset.