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Natural Language Generation Model for mammography reports simulation

Publication Type:

Journal Article

Source:

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform (2020)

ISBN:

2168-2208

Accession Number:

32324577

URL:

https://web.stanford.edu/group/rubinlab/pubs/09072639paper.pdf

Abstract:

Extending the size of labeled corpora of medical reports is a major step towards a successful training of machine learning algorithms. Simulating new text reports is a key solution for reports augmentation, which extends the cohort size. However, text generation in the medical domain is challenging because it needs to preserve both content and style that are typical for real reports. In this paper, we present a conditioned LSTM-RNN architecture for simulating realistic mammography reports. We evaluated the performance by analyzing the characteristics of the simulated reports and classifying them into benign and malignant classes. An average classification AUC was calculated over two distinct test sets. A qualitative analysis was also performed in which a masked radiologist classified 0.75 of the simulated reports as real reports, showing that both the style and content of the simulated reports were similar to real reports. Finally, we compared our RNN-LSTM generative model with Markov Random Fields. The RNN-LSTM provided significantly better and more stable performance than MRFs (p < 0.01, Wilcoxon).