“Nothing Abnormal”: Disambiguating Medical Reports via Contrastive Knowledge Infusion

Abstract Sharing medical reports is essential for patient-centered care. A recent line of work has focused on automatically generating reports with NLP methods. However, different audiences have different purposes when writing/reading medical reports – for example, healthcare professionals care more about pathology, whereas patients are more concerned with the diagnosis ("Is there any abnormality?"). The expectation gap results in a common situation where patients find their medical reports to be ambiguous and therefore unsure about the next steps. In this work, we explore the audience expectation gap in healthcare and summarize common ambiguities that lead patients to be confused about their diagnosis into three categories: medical jargon, contradictory findings, and misleading grammatical errors. Based on our analysis, we define a disambiguation rewriting task to regenerate an input to be unambiguous while preserving information about the original content. We further propose a rewriting algorithm based on contrastive pretraining and perturbation-based rewriting. In addition, we create two datasets, OpenI-Annotated based on chest reports and VA-Annotated based on general medical reports, with available binary labels for ambiguity and abnormality presence annotated by radiology specialists. Experimental results on these datasets show that our proposed algorithm effectively rewrites input sentences in a less ambiguous way with high content fidelity. Our code and annotated data will be released to facilitate future research.