Rule-Based Method to Develop Question-Answer Dataset from Chest X-Ray Reports

Abstract

Available and objective clinical documents are important for research of assistant diagnosis, development of algorithms, and education. To facilitate the readability and variability of clinical documents, this paper presents a rule-based approach to develop a question-answer dataset for chest X-rays from a public collection of radiology examinations, including both images and radiologist narrative reports. Our method simplified the complicated reports via hand-selected keywords, generated more than 63 thousand question-answer pairs via hand-written patterns, and augmented the question-answer dataset to more than 130 thousand pairs via rule-based question answering. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generated question-answer dataset for chest X-rays by rule-based method. The dataset is promising for future researches and applications such as visual question answering, computer-aided diagnosis and so on.