A distributional approach to summarization of radiology reports

Diagnostic radiology reports contain a summary written by a radiologist for communication with primary care providers. Information not included in the summary may be lost in the communication, resulting in substandard patient care. We introduce a notion of salience based on distributional characteristics of term usage in a corpus of radiology reports and present an algorithm for generation of suggestions for inclusion of additional information in report summaries. We evaluate our method on a corpus of 98,913 reports and show our method suggests additions to 11–28% of reports, depending on body location and imaging modality.