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As the number of scientific publications is growing at a rapid pace, it is difficult for laypeople to keep track of and understand the latest scientific advances, especially in the biomedical domain. While the summarization of scientific publications has been widely studied, research on summarization targeting laypeople has remained scarce. In this study, considering the lengthy input of biomedical articles, we have developed a lay summarization system through an extract-then-summarize framework with large language models (LLMs) to summarize biomedical articles for laypeople. Using a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model, our approach achieves the highest overall ranking and demonstrates the best relevance performance in the BioLaySumm 2024 shared task.

ACL 2024

UIUC_BioNLP at BioLaySumm: An Extract-then-Summarize Approach Augmented with Wikipedia Knowledge for Biomedical Lay Summarization

lay summarization

large language models

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

This paper presents our approaches for the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task. We evaluate two methods for generating lay summaries based on biomedical articles: (1) fine-tuning the Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) model, and (2) zero-shot and few-shot prompting on GPT-4. In the fine-tuning approach, we individually fine-tune the LED model using two datasets: PLOS and eLife. This process is conducted under two different settings: one utilizing 50% of the training dataset, and the other utilizing the entire 100% of the training dataset. We compare the results of both methods with GPT-4 in zero-shot and few-shot prompting. The experiment results demonstrate that fine-tuning with 100% of the training data achieves better performance than prompting with GPT-4. However, under data scarcity circumstances, prompting GPT-4 seems to be a better solution.

DeakinNLP at BioLaySumm: Evaluating Fine-tuning Longformer and GPT-4 Prompting for Biomedical Lay Summarization

This paper presents our contribution to the BioLaySumm 2024 shared task of the 23rd BioNLP Workshop. The task is to create a lay summary, given a biomedical research article and its technical summary. As the input to the system could be large, a Longformer Encoder-Decoder (LED) has been used. We continuously pre-trained a general domain LED model with biomedical data to adapt it to this specific domain. In the pre-training phase, several pre-training tasks were aggregated to inject linguistic knowledge and increase the abstractivity of the generated summaries. Since the distribution of samples between the two datasets, eLife and PLOS, is unbalanced, we fine-tuned two models: one for eLife and another for PLOS. To increase the quality of the lay summaries of the system, we developed a regression model that helps us rank the summaries generated by the summarization models. This regression model predicts the quality of the summary in three different aspects: Relevance, Readability, and Factuality. We present the results of our models and a study to measure the ranking capabilities of the regression model.

ELiRF-VRAIN at BioLaySumm: Boosting Lay Summarization Systems Performance with Ranking Models

The BioNLP ACL'24 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation aims to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians by automating the creation of critical sections of patient discharge letters. This paper presents our approach using the Llama3 8B quantized model to generate the "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions" sections. We employ a zero-shot method combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to produce concise, contextually accurate summaries. Our contributions include the development of a curated template-based approach to ensure reliability and consistency, as well as the integration of RAG for word count prediction. We also describe several unsuccessful experiments to provide insights into our pathway for the competition. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, achieving high scores across multiple evaluation metrics.

QUB-Cirdan at "Discharge Me!": Zero shot discharge letter generation by open-source LLM

Radiology Report Generation (RRG) seeks to leverage deep learning techniques to automate the reporting process of radiologists. Current methods are typically modelling RRG as an image-to-text generation task that takes X-ray images as input and generates textual reports describing the corresponding clinical observations. However, the wording of the same clinical observation could have been influenced by the expression preference of radiologists. Nevertheless, such variability can be mitigated by normalizing textual reports into structured representations such as a graph structure. In this study, we attempt a novel paradigm for incorporating graph structural data into the RRG model. Our approach involves predicting graph labels based on visual features and subsequently initiating the decoding process through a template injection conditioned on the predicted labels. We trained and evaluated our model on the BioNLP 2024 Shared Task on Large-Scale Radiology Report Generation and submitted our results to the ViLMedic RRG leaderboard. Although our model showed a moderate ranking on the leaderboard, the results provide preliminary evidence for the feasibility of this new paradigm, warranting further exploration and refinement.

CID at RRG24: Attempting in a Conditionally Initiated Decoding of Radiology Report Generation with Clinical Entities

Clinical documentation is an important aspect of clinicians' daily work and often demands a significant amount of time. The BioNLP 2024 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation (Discharge Me!) aims to alleviate this documentation burden by automatically generating discharge summary sections, including brief hospital course and discharge instruction, which are often time-consuming to synthesize and write manually. We approach the generation task by fine-tuning multiple open-sourced language models (LMs), including both decoder-only and encoder-decoder LMs, with various configurations on input context. We also examine different setups for decoding algorithms, model ensembling or merging, and model specialization. Our results show that conditioning on the content of discharge summary prior to the target sections is effective for the generation task. Furthermore, we find that smaller encoder-decoder LMs can work as well or even slightly better than larger decoder-based LMs fine-tuned through LoRA. The model checkpoints from our team (aehrc) are openly available.

e-Health CSIRO at "Discharge Me!" 2024: Generating Discharge Summary Sections with Fine-tuned Language Models

Automatic generation of discharge summaries presents significant challenges due to the length of clinical documentation, the dispersed nature of patient information, and the diverse terminology used in healthcare. This paper presents a hybrid solution for generating discharge summary sections as part of our participation in the "Discharge Me!" Challenge at the BioNLP 2024 Shared Task. We developed a two-stage generation method using both extractive and abstractive techniques, in which we first apply name entity recognition (NER) to extract key clinical concepts, which are then used as input for a prompt-tuning based GatorTronGPT model to generate coherent text for two important sections including "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions". Our system was ranked 5th in this challenge, achieving an overall score of 0.284. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid solution in improving the quality of automated discharge section generation.

UF-HOBI at "Discharge Me!": A Hybrid Solution for Discharge Summary Generation Through Prompt-based Tuning of GatorTronGPT Models

Healthcare providers spend a significant amount of time reading and synthesizing electronic health records (EHRs), negatively impacting patient outcomes and causing provider burnout. Traditional supervised machine learning approaches using large language models (LLMs) to summarize clinical text have struggled due to hallucinations and lack of relevant training data. Here, we present a novel, simplified solution for the "Discharge Me!" shared task. Our approach mimics human clinical workflow, using pre-trained LLMs to answer specific questions and summarize the answers obtained from discharge summaries and other EHR sections. This method (i) avoids hallucinations through hybrid-RAG/zero-shot contextualized prompting; (ii) requires no extensive training or fine-tuning; and (iii) is adaptable to various clinical tasks.

Roux-lette at "Discharge Me!": Reducing EHR Chart Burden with a Simple, Scalable, Clinician-Driven AI Approach

This paper presents the approach of the iHealth-Chile-1 team for the shared task of Large-Scale Radiology Report Generation at the BioNLP workshop, 
inspired by progress in large multimodal models for processing images and text. In this work, we leverage LLaVA, a Visual-Language Model (VLM), composed of a vision-encoder, a vision-language connector or adapter, and a large language model able to process text and visual embeddings. We achieve our best result by enriching the input prompt of LLaVA with the text output of a simpler report generation model. With this enriched-prompt technique, we improve our results in 4 of 5 metrics (BLEU-4, Rouge-L, BertScore and F1-RadGraph,), only doing in-context learning. Moreover, we provide details about different architecture settings, fine-tuning strategies, and dataset configurations.

iHealth-Chile-1 at RRG24: In-context Learning and Finetuning of a Large Multimodal Model for Radiology Report Generation

In this work, we propose our top-ranking (2nd place) pipeline for the generation of discharge summary subsections as a part of the BioNLP 2024 Shared Task 2: "Discharge Me!". We evaluate both encoder-decoder and state-of-the-art decoder-only language models on the generation of two key sections of the discharge summary. To evaluate the ability of NLP methods to further alleviate the documentation burden on physicians, we also design a novel pipeline to generate the brief hospital course directly from structured information found in the EHR. Finally, we evaluate a constrained beam search approach to inject external knowledge about relevant patient problems into the text generation process. We find that a BioBART model fine-tuned on a larger fraction of the data without constrained beam search outperforms all other models.

Yale at "Discharge Me!": Evaluating Constrained Generation of Discharge Summaries with Unstructured and Structured Information

This paper presents our proposed approach to the Discharge Me! shared task, collocated with the 23th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP). In this work, we develop an LLM-based framework for solving the Discharge Summary Documentation (DSD) task, i.e., generating the two critical target sections `Brief Hospital Course' and `Discharge Instructions' in the discharge summary. By streamlining the recent instruction-finetuning process on LLMs, we explore several prompting strategies for optimally adapting LLMs to specific generation task of DSD. Experimental results show that providing a clear output structure, complimented by a set of comprehensive Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) questions, effectively improves the model's reasoning capability, and thereby, enhancing the structural correctness and faithfulness of clinical information in the generated text. Source code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Discharge_LLM-A233

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UIUC_BioNLP at BioLaySumm: An Extract-then-Summarize Approach Augmented with Wikipedia Knowledge for Biomedical Lay Summarization

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DeakinNLP at BioLaySumm: Evaluating Fine-tuning Longformer and GPT-4 Prompting for Biomedical Lay Summarization

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