Transform(AI)ng Radiology with CheXSBT: Integrating Dual-Attention Swin Transformer with BERT for Seamless Chest X-Ray Report Generation

Radiology reports are crucial for diagnosing diseases, yet generation them is time-consuming, places a significant workload on medical professionals, and is subject to inter-expert variability, as different radiologists may interpret the same X-ray differently. This paper presents a novel hybrid AI model called CheXSBT, which combines our custom-designed Dual-Attention Swin Transformer (DAST) for vision processing with BERT for natural language understanding to automate the generation of chest X-ray (CXR) reports. Leveraging the MIMIC-CXR dataset, which includes over 370,000 X-ray images and their corresponding reports, CheXSBT learns to interpret chest X-ray images and convert them into structured, meaningful text. Our study focuses on two main objectives: (1) automating report generation to accelerate the diagnostic process and (2) improving model interpretability to foster trust among radiologists. The approach involves preprocessing chest X-ray images and their corresponding text reports using the pre-trained BLIP processor, training the novel hybrid vision-language model on paired data, and fine-tuning it for clinical relevance and coherence. The performance of CheXSBT is rigorously evaluated using established metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, achieving scores of 0.232 for BLEU-4 and 0.392 for ROUGE-L, outperforming other state-of-the-art models and ensuring high-quality report generation. By reducing radiologists’ workload and providing quick, accurate information, CheXSBT aims to transform the intersection between AI and clinical practice, making radiology reporting more efficient, consistent, and accessible.