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Enhancing Image-to-Text Generation in Radiology Reports through Cross-modal Multi-Task Learning

Image-to-text generation involves automatically generating descriptive text from images and has applications in medical report generation. However, traditional approaches often exhibit a semantic gap between visual and textual information. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning framework to leverage both visual and non-imaging data for generating radiology reports. Along with chest X-ray images, 10 additional features comprising numeric, binary, categorical, and text data were incorporated to create a unified representation. The model was trained to generate text, predict the degree of patient severity, and identify medical findings. Multi-task learning, especially with text generation prioritisation, improved performance over single-task baselines across language generation metrics. The framework also mitigated overfitting in auxiliary tasks compared to single-task models. Qualitative analysis showed logically coherent narratives and accurate identification of findings, though some repetition and disjointed phrasing remained. This work demonstrates the benefits of multi-modal, multi-task learning for image-to-text generation applications.