# Unifying Relational Sentence Generation and Retrieval for Medical Image Report Composition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03287/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Knowing When to Look: Adaptive Attention via A Visual Sentinel for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01887/) (2016)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [On the Automatic Generation of Medical Imaging Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08195/) (2017)
- [X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14080/) (2020)
- [CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04573/) (2016)
- [Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11080/) (2018)
- [Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Reinforced Agent for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08298/) (2018)
- [A Hierarchical Approach for Generating Descriptive Image Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06607/) (2016)
- [Knowledge-driven Encode, Retrieve, Paraphrase for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10122/) (2019)
- [Attention-Based Multimodal Fusion for Video Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03126/) (2017)
- [Multi-Label Classification with Label Graph Superimposing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09243/) (2019)
- [Massive Exploration of Neural Machine Translation Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03906/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06965/) (2021)
- [Automated Radiology Report Generation: A Review of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10842/) (2024)
- [Radiology Report Generation via Multi-objective Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08901/) (2024)
- [Egocentric Image Captioning for Privacy-Preserved Passive Dietary Intake Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00372/) (2021)
- [A Data-Driven Guided Decoding Mechanism for Diagnostic Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14164/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Radiology Report Generation via Causal Inspired Counterfactual Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13307/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Clinical Knowledge Integration for Mammography Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Beyond generating long and topic-coherent paragraphs in traditional captioning tasks, the medical image report composition task poses more task-oriented challenges by requiring both the highly-accurate medical term diagnosis and multiple heterogeneous forms of information including impression and findings. Current methods often generate the most common sentences due to dataset bias for individual case, regardless of whether the sentences properly capture key entities and relationships. Such limitations severely hinder their applicability and generalization capability in medical report composition where the most critical sentences lie in the descriptions of abnormal diseases that are relatively rare. Moreover, some medical terms appearing in one report are often entangled with each other and co-occurred, e.g. symptoms associated with a specific disease. To enforce the semantic consistency of medical terms to be incorporated into the final reports and encourage the sentence generation for rare abnormal descriptions, we propose a novel framework that unifies template retrieval and sentence generation to handle both common and rare abnormality while ensuring the semantic-coherency among the detected medical terms. Specifically, our approach exploits hybrid-knowledge co-reasoning: i) explicit relationships among all abnormal medical terms to induce the visual attention learning and topic representation encoding for better topic-oriented symptoms descriptions; ii) adaptive generation mode that changes between the template retrieval and sentence generation according to a contextual topic encoder. Experimental results on two medical report benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in terms of both human and metrics evaluation.