2021/10/28 by Jaiswal, Ajay, Tang, Liyan, Ghosh, Meheli +3
#Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.15426
Radiology reports are unstructured and contain the imaging findings and corresponding diagnoses transcribed by radiologists which include clinical facts and negated and/or uncertain statements. Extracting pathologic findings and diagnoses from radiology reports is important for quality control, population health, and monitoring of disease progress. Existing works, primarily rely either on rule-based systems or transformer-based pre-trained model fine-tuning, but could not take the factual and uncertain information into consideration, and therefore generate false-positive outputs. In this work, we introduce three sedulous augmentation techniques which retain factual and critical information while generating augmentations for contrastive learning. We introduce RadBERT-CL, which fuses these information into BlueBert via a self-supervised contrastive loss. Our experiments on MIMIC-CXR show superior performance of RadBERT-CL on fine-tuning for multi-class, multi-label report classification. We illustrate that when few labeled data are available, RadBERT-CL outperforms conventional SOTA transformers (BERT/BlueBert) by significantly larger margins (6-11%). We also show that the representations learned by RadBERT-CL can capture critical medical information in the latent space.