Interleaved Text/Image Deep Mining on a Very Large-Scale Radiology Database

Despite tremendous progress in computer vision, effective learning on very large-scale (>100K patients) medical image databases has been vastly hindered. We present an interleaved text/image deep learning system to extract and mine the semantic interactions of radiology images and reports from a national research hospital's picture archiving and communication system. Instead of using full 3D medical volumes, we focus on a collection of representative ~216K 2D key images/slices (selected by clinicians for diagnostic reference) with text-driven scalar and vector labels. Our system interleaves between unsupervised learning (e.g., latent Dirichlet allocation, recurrent neural net language models) on document- and sentence-level texts to generate semantic labels and supervised learning via deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to map from images to label spaces. Disease-related key words can be predicted for radiology images in a retrieval manner. We have demonstrated promising quantitative and qualitative results. The large-scale datasets of extracted key images and their categorization, embedded vector labels and sentence descriptions can be harnessed to alleviate the deep learning "data-hungry" obstacle in the medical domain.