# IIHT: Medical Report Generation with Image-to-Indicator Hierarchical Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05633/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Image Captioning with Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03925/) (2016)
- [On the Automatic Generation of Medical Imaging Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08195/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Masked Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00819/) (2018)
- [Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13258/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Reinforced Agent for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08298/) (2018)
- [TieNet: Text-Image Embedding Network for Common Thorax Disease Classification and Reporting in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04334/) (2018)
- [Competence-based Multimodal Curriculum Learning for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14579/) (2022)
- [Learning to Read Chest X-Rays: Recurrent Neural Cascade Model for Automated Image Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08486/) (2016)
- [Show, Describe and Conclude: On Exploiting the Structure Information of Chest X-Ray Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12274/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Topic-Transition GAN for Visual Paragraph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07022/) (2017)
- [simNet: Stepwise Image-Topic Merging Network for Generating Detailed and Comprehensive Image Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08732/) (2018)
- [Variational Topic Inference for Chest X-Ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07314/) (2021)
- [DeltaNet:Conditional Medical Report Generation for COVID-19 Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13229/) (2022)
- [Prior Knowledge Enhances Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03761/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated medical report generation has become increasingly important in medical analysis. It can produce computer-aided diagnosis descriptions and thus significantly alleviate the doctors' work. Inspired by the huge success of neural machine translation and image captioning, various deep learning methods have been proposed for medical report generation. However, due to the inherent properties of medical data, including data imbalance and the length and correlation between report sequences, the generated reports by existing methods may exhibit linguistic fluency but lack adequate clinical accuracy. In this work, we propose an image-to-indicator hierarchical transformer (IIHT) framework for medical report generation. It consists of three modules, i.e., a classifier module, an indicator expansion module and a generator module. The classifier module first extracts image features from the input medical images and produces disease-related indicators with their corresponding states. The disease-related indicators are subsequently utilised as input for the indicator expansion module, incorporating the "data-text-data" strategy. The transformer-based generator then leverages these extracted features along with image features as auxiliary information to generate final reports. Furthermore, the proposed IIHT method is feasible for radiologists to modify disease indicators in real-world scenarios and integrate the operations into the indicator expansion module for fluent and accurate medical report generation. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods under various evaluation metrics demonstrate the great performance of the proposed method.