Dataset Information

Understanding spatial language in radiology: Representation framework, annotation, and spatial relation extraction from chest X-ray reports using deep learning.

ABSTRACT: Radiology reports contain a radiologist's interpretations of images, and these images frequently describe spatial relations. Important radiographic findings are mostly described in reference to an anatomical location through spatial prepositions. Such spatial relationships are also linked to various differential diagnoses and often described through uncertainty phrases. Structured representation of this clinically significant spatial information has the potential to be used in a variety of downstream clinical informatics applications. Our focus is to extract these spatial representations from the reports. For this, we first define a representation framework based on the Spatial Role Labeling (SpRL) scheme, which we refer to as Rad-SpRL. In Rad-SpRL, common radiological entities tied to spatial relations are encoded through four spatial roles: Trajector, Landmark, Diagnosis, and Hedge, all identified in relation to a spatial preposition (or Spatial Indicator). We annotated a total of 2,000 chest X-ray reports following Rad-SpRL. We then propose a deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) method involving word and character-level encodings to first extract the Spatial Indicators followed by identifying the corresponding spatial roles. Specifically, we use a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) conditional random field (CRF) neural network as the baseline model. Additionally, we incorporate contextualized word representations from pre-trained language models (BERT and XLNet) for extracting the spatial information. We evaluate both gold and predicted Spatial Indicators to extract the four types of spatial roles. The results are promising, with the highest average F1 measure for Spatial Indicator extraction being 91.29 (XLNet); the highest average overall F1 measure considering all the four spatial roles being 92.9 using gold Indicators (XLNet); and 85.6 using predicted Indicators (BERT pre-trained on MIMIC notes). The corpus is available in Mendeley at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/yhb26hfz8n.1 and https://github.com/krobertslab/datasets/blob/master/Rad-SpRL.xml.

SUBMITTER: Datta S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7807990 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Understanding spatial language in radiology: Representation framework, annotation, and spatial relation extraction from chest X-ray reports using deep learning.

Datta Surabhi S Si Yuqi Y Rodriguez Laritza L Shooshan Sonya E SE Demner-Fushman Dina D Roberts Kirk K

Journal of biomedical informatics 20200618

Radiology reports contain a radiologist's interpretations of images, and these images frequently describe spatial relations. Important radiographic findings are mostly described in reference to an anatomical location through spatial prepositions. Such spatial relationships are also linked to various differential diagnoses and often described through uncertainty phrases. Structured representation of this clinically significant spatial information has the potential to be used in a variety of downs ...[more]

PMID: 32562898

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Project description:BackgroundNatural language processing (NLP) has a significant role in advancing healthcare and has been found to be key in extracting structured information from radiology reports. Understanding recent developments in NLP application to radiology is of significance but recent reviews on this are limited. This study systematically assesses and quantifies recent literature in NLP applied to radiology reports.MethodsWe conduct an automated literature search yielding 4836 results using automated filtering, metadata enriching steps and citation search combined with manual review. Our analysis is based on 21 variables including radiology characteristics, NLP methodology, performance, study, and clinical application characteristics.ResultsWe present a comprehensive analysis of the 164 publications retrieved with publications in 2019 almost triple those in 2015. Each publication is categorised into one of 6 clinical application categories. Deep learning use increases in the period but conventional machine learning approaches are still prevalent. Deep learning remains challenged when data is scarce and there is little evidence of adoption into clinical practice. Despite 17% of studies reporting greater than 0.85 F1 scores, it is hard to comparatively evaluate these approaches given that most of them use different datasets. Only 14 studies made their data and 15 their code available with 10 externally validating results.ConclusionsAutomated understanding of clinical narratives of the radiology reports has the potential to enhance the healthcare process and we show that research in this field continues to grow. Reproducibility and explainability of models are important if the domain is to move applications into clinical use. More could be done to share code enabling validation of methods on different institutional data and to reduce heterogeneity in reporting of study properties allowing inter-study comparisons. Our results have significance for researchers in the field providing a systematic synthesis of existing work to build on, identify gaps, opportunities for collaboration and avoid duplication.

Dataset Information

Understanding spatial language in radiology: Representation framework, annotation, and spatial relation extraction from chest X-ray reports using deep learning.

Publications

Understanding spatial language in radiology: Representation framework, annotation, and spatial relation extraction from chest X-ray reports using deep learning.

Similar Datasets

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