Automatic captioning for medical imaging (MIC): a rapid review of literature

Abstract

Automatically understanding the content of medical images and delivering accurate descriptions is an emerging field of artificial intelligence that combines skills in both computer vision and natural language processing fields. Medical image captioning is involved in various applications related to diagnosis, treatment, report generation and computer-aided diagnosis to facilitate the decision making and clinical workflows. Unlike generic image captioning, medical image captioning highlights the relationships between image objects and clinical findings, which makes it a very challenging task. Although few review papers have already been published in this field, their coverage is still quite limited and only particular problems are addressed.