  Medical image interpretation is central to most clinical applications such as
disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognostication. In clinical
practice, radiologists examine medical images and manually compile their
findings into reports, which can be a time-consuming process. Automated
approaches to radiology report generation, therefore, can reduce radiologist
workload and improve efficiency in the clinical pathway. While recent
deep-learning approaches for automated report generation from medical images
have seen some success, most studies have relied on image-derived features
alone, ignoring non-imaging patient data. Although a few studies have included
the word-level contexts along with the image, the use of patient demographics
is still unexplored. This paper proposes a novel multi-modal transformer
network that integrates chest x-ray (CXR) images and associated patient
demographic information, to synthesise patient-specific radiology reports. The
proposed network uses a convolutional neural network to extract visual features
from CXRs and a transformer-based encoder-decoder network that combines the
visual features with semantic text embeddings of patient demographic
information, to synthesise full-text radiology reports. Data from two public
databases were used to train and evaluate the proposed approach. CXRs and
reports were extracted from the MIMIC-CXR database and combined with
corresponding patients' data MIMIC-IV. Based on the evaluation metrics used
including patient demographic information was found to improve the quality of
reports generated using the proposed approach, relative to a baseline network
trained using CXRs alone. The proposed approach shows potential for enhancing
radiology report generation by leveraging rich patient metadata and combining
semantic text embeddings derived thereof, with medical image-derived visual
features.
