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Automatic radiology report generation can alleviate the workload for physicians and minimize regional disparities in medical resources, therefore becoming an important topic in the medical image analysis field. It is a challenging task, as the computational model needs to mimic physicians to obtain information from multi-modal input data (i.e., medical images, clinical information, medical knowledge, etc.), and produce comprehensive and accurate reports. Recently, numerous works emerged to address this issue using deep learning-based methods, such as transformers, contrastive learning, and knowledge-base construction. This survey summarizes the key techniques developed in the most recent works and proposes a general workflow for deep learning-based report generation with five main components, including multi-modality data acquisition, data preparation, feature learning, feature fusion/interaction, and report generation. The state-of-the-art methods for each of these components are highlighted. Additionally, training strategies, public datasets, evaluation methods, current challenges, and future directions in this field are summarized. We have also conducted a quantitative comparison between different methods under the same experimental setting. This is the most up-to-date survey that focuses on multi-modality inputs and data fusion for radiology report generation. The aim is to provide comprehensive and rich information for researchers interested in automatic clinical report generation and medical image analysis, especially when using multimodal inputs, and assist them in developing new algorithms to advance the field. |
