Automatically summarizing radiology reports into a concise impression can reduce the manual burden of clinicians and improve the consistency of reporting. Previous work aimed to enhance content selection and factuality through guided abstractive summarization. However, two key issues persist. First, current methods heavily rely on domain-specific resources to extract the guidance signal, limiting their transferability to domains and languages where those resources are unavailable. Second, while automatic metrics like ROUGE show progress, we lack a good understanding of the errors and failure modes in this task. To bridge these gaps, we first propose a domain-agnostic guidance signal in form of variable-length extractive summaries. Our empirical results on two English benchmarks demonstrate that this guidance signal improves upon unguided summarization while being competitive with domain-specific methods. Additionally, we run an expert evaluation of four systems according to a taxonomy of 11 fine-grained errors. We find that the most pressing differences between automatic summaries and those of radiologists relate to content selection including omissions (up to 52%) and additions (up to 57%). We hypothesize that latent reporting factors and corpus-level inconsistencies may limit models to reliably learn content selection from the available data, presenting promising directions for future work.

自动生成放射学报告的简明摘要可以减轻临床医生的手动负担，并提高报告的一致性。本研究解决了当前方法依赖领域特定资源和了解错误和失败模式的不足，并提出了一种领域无关的变长提取式摘要作为导向信号，进一步改进了自动摘要的效果，并发现自动摘要与放射学家的最大差异在于内容选取和错误分析，对未来研究提出了有希望的方向。

放射学报告总结的指导: 实证评估和错误分析