Specialised or Generic? Tokenization Choices for Radiology Language Models

The vocabulary used by language models (LM) - defined by the tokenizer - plays a key role in text generation quality. However, its impact remains under-explored in radiology. In this work, we address this gap by systematically comparing general, medical, and domain-specific tokenizers on the task of radiology report summarisation across three imaging modalities. We also investigate scenarios with and without LM pre-training on PubMed abstracts. Our findings demonstrate that medical and domain-specific vocabularies outperformed widely used natural language alternatives when models are trained from scratch. Pre-training partially mitigates performance differences between tokenizers, whilst the domain-specific tokenizers achieve the most favourable results. Domain-specific tokenizers also reduce memory requirements due to smaller vocabularies and shorter sequences. These results demonstrate that adapting the vocabulary of LMs to the clinical domain provides practical benefits, including improved performance and reduced computational demands, making such models more accessible and effective for both research and real-world healthcare settings.

Quality Control for Radiology Report Generation Models via Auxiliary Auditing Components

Automation of medical image interpretation could alleviate bottlenecks in diagnostic workflows, and has become of particular interest in recent years due to advancements in natural language processing. Great strides have been made towards automated radiology report generation via AI, yet ensuring clinical accuracy in generated reports is a significant challenge, hindering deployment of such methods in clinical practice. In this work we propose a quality control framework for assessing the reliability of AI-generated radiology reports with respect to semantics of diagnostic importance using modular auxiliary auditing components (AC). Evaluating our pipeline on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, our findings show that incorporating ACs in the form of disease-classifiers can enable auditing that identifies more reliable reports, resulting in higher F1 scores compared to unfiltered generated reports. Additionally, leveraging the confidence of the AC labels further improves the audit's effectiveness.

Semi-Supervised Learning for Deep Causal Generative Models

Developing models that can answer questions of the form "How would $x$ change if $y$ had been $z$?" is fundamental for advancing medical image analysis. Training causal generative models that address such counterfactual questions, though, currently requires that all relevant variables have been observed and that corresponding labels are available in training data. However, clinical data may not have complete records for all patients and state of the art causal generative models are unable to take full advantage of this. We thus develop, for the first time, a semi-supervised deep causal generative model that exploits the causal relationships between variables to maximise the use of all available data. We explore this in the setting where each sample is either fully labelled or fully unlabelled, as well as the more clinically realistic case of having different labels missing for each sample. We leverage techniques from causal inference to infer missing values and subsequently generate realistic counterfactuals, even for samples with incomplete labels.