mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Natural Language Generation in Healthcare: A Review of Methods and Applications

arXiv 2505.04073 ↗First posted 7 May 2025cs.CLcited by 3

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language generation (NLG) is the key technology to achieve generative artificial intelligence (AI). With the breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), NLG has been widely used in various medical applications, demonstrating the potential to enhance clinical workflows, support clinical decision-making, and improve clinical documentation. Heterogeneous and diverse medical data modalities, such as medical text, images, and knowledge bases, are utilized in NLG. Researchers have proposed many generative models and applied them in a number of healthcare applications. There is a need for a comprehensive review of NLG methods and applications in the medical domain. In this study, we systematically reviewed 113 scientific publications from a total of 3,988 NLG-related articles identified using a literature search, focusing on data modality, model architecture, clinical applications, and evaluation methods. Following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines, we categorize key methods, identify clinical applications, and assess their capabilities, limitations, and emerging challenges. This timely review covers the key NLG technologies and medical applications and provides valuable insights for future studies to leverage NLG to transform medical discovery and healthcare.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 56 of its 133 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2025.

Builds on

56 of 133 references.

References · 56

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  4. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  5. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  6. 2014Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networkscited by 2,974
  7. 2014CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluationcited by 2,027
  8. 2019CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparisoncited by 1,410
  9. 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Daycited by 1,287
  10. 2020BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generationcited by 1,196
  11. 2023BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairscited by 506
  12. 2021A Survey of Transformerscited by 399
38 more
  1. 2023Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learnercited by 387
  2. 2020Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformercited by 363
  3. 2020CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERTcited by 329
  4. 2021RadGraph: Extracting Clinical Entities and Relations from Radiology Reportscited by 310
  5. 2023Adapted Large Language Models Can Outperform Medical Experts in Clinical Text Summarizationcited by 244
  6. 2017Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluationcited by 206
  7. 2023BiomedGPT: A Generalist Vision-Language Foundation Model for Diverse Biomedical Taskscited by 201
  8. 2022Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generationcited by 183
  9. 2023A Study of Generative Large Language Model for Medical Research and Healthcarecited by 160
  10. 2020Improving Factual Completeness and Consistency of Image-to-Text Radiology Report Generationcited by 139
  11. 2023Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Modelscited by 115
  12. 2021Radiology Report Generation with a Learned Knowledge Base and Multi-modal Alignmentcited by 71
  13. 2023A Comprehensive Survey on Applications of Transformers for Deep Learning Taskscited by 70
  14. 2020Generating SOAP Notes from Doctor-Patient Conversations Using Modular Summarization Techniquescited by 64
  15. 2020Dr. Summarize: Global Summarization of Medical Dialogue by Exploiting Local Structurescited by 49
  16. 2021Leveraging Pretrained Models for Automatic Summarization of Doctor-Patient Conversationscited by 42
  17. 2021Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generationcited by 39
  18. 2021Semi-Supervised Variational Reasoning for Medical Dialogue Generationcited by 30
  19. 2022Summarizing Patients Problems from Hospital Progress Notes Using Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Modelscited by 30
  20. 2018Natural Language Generation for Electronic Health Recordscited by 27
  21. 2020Attend to Medical Ontologies: Content Selection for Clinical Abstractive Summarizationcited by 26
  22. 2023BioInstruct: Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processingcited by 25
  23. 2022Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarizationcited by 24
  24. 2023Longitudinal Data and a Semantic Similarity Reward for Chest X-Ray Report Generationcited by 24
  25. 2019Towards Automatic Generation of Shareable Synthetic Clinical Notes Using Neural Language Modelscited by 20
  26. 2023Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 20
  27. 2024Overview of the First Shared Task on Clinical Text Generation: RRG24 and "Discharge Me!"cited by 19
  28. 2022Attributed Abnormality Graph Embedding for Clinically Accurate X-Ray Report Generationcited by 17
  29. 2024Abstractive Text Summarization: State of the Art, Challenges, and Improvementscited by 17
  30. 2018Generation of Synthetic Electronic Medical Record Textcited by 14
  31. 2023A Systematic Review of Deep Learning-based Research on Radiology Report Generationcited by 14
  32. 2021A Survey of Natural Language Generationcited by 13
  33. 2022Differentiable Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Multi-Step Radiology Report Summarizationcited by 13
  34. 2023ProKnow: Process Knowledge for Safety Constrained and Explainable Question Generation for Mental Health Diagnostic Assistancecited by 10
  35. 2022Medical Dialogue Response Generation with Pivotal Information Recallingcited by 9
  36. 2023Response-act Guided Reinforced Dialogue Generation for Mental Health Counselingcited by 9
  37. 2023GersteinLab at MEDIQA-Chat 2023: Clinical Note Summarization from Doctor-Patient Conversations through Fine-tuning and In-context Learningcited by 9
  38. 2023shs-nlp at RadSum23: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training of Instruction-tuned LLMs for Radiology Report Impression Generationcited by 7

50 most cited of 56 All 56 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.