Medical image captioning based on Deep Architectures

Sammanfattning: Diagnostic Captioning is described as “the automatic generation of a diagnostic text from a set of medical images of a patient collected during an examination” [59] and it can assist inexperienced doctors and radiologists to reduce clinical errors or help experienced professionals increase their productivity. In this context, tools that would help medical doctors produce higher quality reports in less time could be of high interest for medical imaging departments, as well as significantly impact deep learning research within the biomedical domain, which makes it particularly interesting for people involved in industry and researchers all along. In this work, we attempted to develop Diagnostic Captioning systems, based on novel Deep Learning approaches, to investigate to what extent Neural Networks are capable of performing medical image tagging, as well as automatically generating a diagnostic text from a set of medical images. Towards this objective, the first step is concept detection, which boils down to predicting the relevant tags for X-RAY images, whereas the ultimate goal is caption generation. To this end, we further participated in ImageCLEFmedical 2022 evaluation campaign, addressing both the concept detection and the caption prediction tasks by developing baselines based on Deep Neural Networks; including image encoders, classifiers and text generators; in order to get a quantitative measure of my proposed architectures’ performance [28]. My contribution to the evaluation campaign, as part of this work and on behalf of NeuralDynamicsLab¹ group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, within the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, ranked 4th in the former and 5th in the latter task [55, 68] among 12 groups included within the top-10 best performing submissions in both tasks.