Medical report generation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis. Although existing approaches have achieved promising results, they either require a predefined template database in order to retrieve sentences or ignore the hierarchical nature of medical report generation. To address these issues, we propose MedWriter that incorporates a novel hierarchical retrieval mechanism to automatically extract both report and sentence-level templates for clinically accurate report generation. MedWriter first employs the Visual-Language Retrieval~(VLR) module to retrieve the most relevant reports for the given images. To guarantee the logical coherence between sentences, the Language-Language Retrieval~(LLR) module is introduced to retrieve relevant sentences based on the previous generated description. At last, a language decoder fuses image features and features from retrieved reports and sentences to generate meaningful medical reports. We verified the effectiveness of our model by automatic evaluation and human evaluation on two datasets, i.e., Open-I and MIMIC-CXR.

MedWriter利用新型层次检索机制自动提取临床准确的医学报告，包括报告和句子级模板，以生成有意义的医学报告。通过Open-I和MIMIC-CXR的自动评估和人工评估验证了模型的有效性。

通过记忆撰写：分层检索驱动医疗报告生成