Evidential Interactive Learning for Medical Image Captioning

Medical image captioning alleviates the burden of physicians and possibly reduces medical errors by automatically generating text descriptions to describe image contents and convey findings. It is more challenging than conventional image captioning due to the complexity of medical images and the difficulty of aligning image regions with medical terms. In this paper, we propose an evidential interactive learning framework that leverages evidence-based uncertainty estimation and interactive machine learning to improve image captioning with limited labeled data. The interactive learning process involves three stages: keyword prediction, caption generation, and model retraining. First, the model predicts a list of keywords with evidence-based uncertainty and selects the most informative keywords to seek user feedback. Second, user-approved keywords are used as model input to guide the model to generate satisfactory captions. Third, the model is updated based on user-approved keywords and captions, where evidence-based uncertainty is used to allocate different weights to different data instances. Experiments on two medical image datasets illustrate that the proposed framework can effectively learn from human feedback and improve the model’s performance in the future.