CCheXR-Attention: Clinical concept extraction and chest x-ray reports classification using modified Mogrifier and bidirectional LSTM with multihead attention

Radiology reports cover different aspects, from radiological observation to the diagnosis of an imaging examination, such as X-rays, MRI, and CT scans. Abundant patient information presented in radiology reports poses a few major challenges. First, radiology reports follow a free-text reporting format, which causes the loss of a large amount of information in unstructured text. Second, the extraction of important features from these reports is a huge bottleneck for machine learning models. These challenges are important, particularly the extraction of key features such as symptoms, comparison/priors, technique, finding, and impression because they facilitate the decision-making on patients’ health. To alleviate this issue, a novel architecture CCheXR-Attention is proposed to extract the clinical features from the radiological reports and classify each report into normal and abnormal categories based on the extracted information. We have proposed a modified mogrifier LSTM model and integrated a multihead attention method to extract the more relevant features. Experimental outcomes on two benchmark datasets demonstrated that the proposed model surpassed state-of-the-art models.