Factored Attention and Embedding for Unstructured-view Topic-related Ultrasound Report Generation

Echocardiography is widely used to clinical practice for diagnosis and treatment, e.g., on the common congenital heart defects. The traditional manual manipulation is error-prone due to the staff shortage, excess workload, and less experience, leading to the urgent requirement of an automated computer-aided reporting system to lighten the workload of ultrasonologists considerably and assist them in decision making. Despite some recent successful attempts in automatical medical report generation, they are trapped in the ultrasound report generation, which involves unstructured-view images and topic-related descriptions. To this end, we investigate the task of the unstructured-view topic-related ultrasound report generation, and propose a novel factored attention and embedding model (termed FAE-Gen). The proposed FAE-Gen mainly consists of two modules, i.e., view-guided factored attention and topic-oriented factored embedding, which 1) capture the homogeneous and heterogeneous morphological characteristic across different views, and 2) generate the descriptions with different syntactic patterns and different emphatic contents for different topics. Experimental evaluations are conducted on a to-be-released large-scale clinical cardiovascular ultrasound dataset (CardUltData). Both quantitative comparisons and qualitative analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of FAE-Gen over seven commonly-used metrics.