Language Models for Hierarchical Classification of Radiology Reports With Attention Mechanisms, BERT, and GPT-4

Radiology reports are a valuable source of textual information used to improve clinical care and support research. In recent years, deep learning techniques have been shown to be effective in classifying radiology reports. This article investigates the use of deep learning techniques with attention mechanisms to achieve better performance in the classification of radiology reports. We focus on various Natural Language Processing approaches, such as LSTM with Attention, BERT, and GPT-4, evaluated on a chest tomography report dataset regarding neoplastic diseases collected from an Italian hospital. In particular, we compare the results with a previous machine learning system, showing that models based on attention mechanisms can achieve higher performance. The Attention Mechanism allows us to identify the most relevant bits of text used by the model to make its predictions. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the hierarchical classification of radiology reports. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of GPT-4 on the classification of these reports in a zero-shot setup through prompt engineering, showing interesting results even with a small context and a non-English language. Our findings suggest that deep learning techniques with attention mechanisms may be successful in the classification of radiology reports even in non-English languages for which it is not possible to leverage on large text corpus.