Daily Papers

Biomedical imaging datasets are often small and biased, meaning that real-world performance of predictive models can be substantially lower than expected from internal testing. This work proposes using generative image editing to simulate dataset shifts and diagnose failure modes of biomedical vision models; this can be used in advance of deployment to assess readiness, potentially reducing cost and patient harm. Existing editing methods can produce undesirable changes, with spurious correlations learned due to the co-occurrence of disease and treatment interventions, limiting practical applicability. To address this, we train a text-to-image diffusion model on multiple chest X-ray datasets and introduce a new editing method RadEdit that uses multiple masks, if present, to constrain changes and ensure consistency in the edited images. We consider three types of dataset shifts: acquisition shift, manifestation shift, and population shift, and demonstrate that our approach can diagnose failures and quantify model robustness without additional data collection, complementing more qualitative tools for explainable AI.

We systematically investigate lightweight strategies to adapt large language models (LLMs) for the task of radiology report summarization (RRS). Specifically, we focus on domain adaptation via pretraining (on natural language, biomedical text, or clinical text) and via discrete prompting or parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results consistently achieve best performance by maximally adapting to the task via pretraining on clinical text and fine-tuning on RRS examples. Importantly, this method fine-tunes a mere 0.32% of parameters throughout the model, in contrast to end-to-end fine-tuning (100% of parameters). Additionally, we study the effect of in-context examples and out-of-distribution (OOD) training before concluding with a radiologist reader study and qualitative analysis. Our findings highlight the importance of domain adaptation in RRS and provide valuable insights toward developing effective natural language processing solutions for clinical tasks.