Semantic Textual Similarity Assessment in Chest X-ray Reports Using a Domain-Specific Cosine-Based Metric

Medical language processing and deep learning techniques have emerged as critical tools for improving healthcare, particularly in the analysis of medical imaging and medical text data. These multimodal data fusion techniques help to improve the interpretation of medical imaging and lead to increased diagnostic accuracy, informed clinical decisions, and improved patient outcomes. The success of these models relies on the ability to extract and consolidate semantic information from clinical text. This paper addresses the need for more robust methods to evaluate the semantic content of medical reports. Conventional natural language processing approaches and metrics are initially designed for considering the semantic context in the natural language domain and machine translation, often failing to capture the complex semantic meanings inherent in medical content. In this study, we introduce a novel approach designed specifically for assessing the semantic similarity between generated medical reports and the ground truth. Our approach is validated, demonstrating its efficiency in assessing domain-specific semantic similarity within medical contexts. By applying our metric to state-of-the-art Chest X-ray report generation models, we obtain results that not only align with conventional metrics but also provide more contextually meaningful scores in the considered medical domain.

How far generated data can impact Neural Networks performance?

The success of deep learning models depends on the size and quality of the dataset to solve certain tasks. Here, we explore how far generated data can aid real data in improving the performance of Neural Networks. In this work, we consider facial expression recognition since it requires challenging local data generation at the level of local regions such as mouth, eyebrows, etc, rather than simple augmentation. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) provide an alternative method for generating such local deformations but they need further validation. To answer our question, we consider noncomplex Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based classifiers for recognizing Ekman emotions. For the data generation process, we consider generating facial expressions (FEs) by relying on two GANs. The first generates a random identity while the second imposes facial deformations on top of it. We consider training the CNN classifier using FEs from: real-faces, GANs-generated, and finally using a combination of real and GAN-generated faces. We determine an upper bound regarding the data generation quantity to be mixed with the real one which contributes the most to enhancing FER accuracy. In our experiments, we find out that 5-times more synthetic data to the real FEs dataset increases accuracy by 16%.