An Iterative Optimizing Framework for Radiology Report Summarization with ChatGPT

TL;DR

This paper introduces ImpressionGPT, an iterative framework leveraging ChatGPT's in-context learning for radiology report impression generation, achieving state-of-the-art results without additional training.

Contribution

It proposes a dynamic prompt construction and iterative optimization method to enhance LLM performance in domain-specific radiology report summarization.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on MIMIC-CXR and OpenI datasets.

Does not require additional training or fine-tuning of LLMs.

Demonstrates effective domain adaptation of general-purpose LLMs.

Abstract

The 'Impression' section of a radiology report is a critical basis for communication between radiologists and other physicians, and it is typically written by radiologists based on the 'Findings' section. However, writing numerous impressions can be laborious and error-prone for radiologists. Although recent studies have achieved promising results in automatic impression generation using large-scale medical text data for pre-training and fine-tuning pre-trained language models, such models often require substantial amounts of medical text data and have poor generalization performance. While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown strong generalization capabilities and performance, their performance in specific domains, such as radiology, remains under-investigated and potentially limited. To address this limitation, we propose ImpressionGPT, which leverages the in-context learning capability of LLMs by constructing dynamic contexts using domain-specific, individualized data. This dynamic prompt approach enables the model to learn contextual knowledge from semantically similar examples from existing data. Additionally, we design an iterative optimization algorithm that performs automatic evaluation on the generated impression results and composes the corresponding instruction prompts to further optimize the model. The proposed ImpressionGPT model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both MIMIC-CXR and OpenI datasets without requiring additional training data or fine-tuning the LLMs. This work presents a paradigm for localizing LLMs that can be applied in a wide range of similar application scenarios, bridging the gap between general-purpose LLMs and the specific language processing needs of various domains.