AHIVE: Anatomy-aware Hierarchical Vision Encoding for Interactive Radiology Report Retrieval

Automatic radiology report generation using deep learning models has been recently explored and found promising. Neural decoders are commonly used for the report generation, where irrelevant and unfaithful contents are unavoidable. The retrieval-based approach alleviates the limitation by identifying reports which are relevant to the input to assist the generation. To achieve clinically accurate report retrieval, we make reference to clinicians' diagnostic steps of examining a radiology image where anatomical and diagnostic details are typically focused, and propose a novel hierarchical visual concept representation called anatomy-aware hierarchical vision encoding (AHIVE). To learn AHIVE, we first derive a methodology to extract hierarchical diagnostic descriptions from radiology reports and develop a CLIP-based framework for the model training. Also, the hierarchical architecture of AHIVE is designed to support interactive report retrieval so that report revision made at one layer can be propagated to the subsequent ones to trigger other necessary revisions. We conduct extensive experiments and show that AHIVE can outperform the SOTA vision-language retrieval methods in terms of clinical accuracy by a large margin. We provide also a case study to illustrate how it enables interactive report retrieval.