MEDIQA 2021

News

• May 2021: Overview paper of the MEDIQA 2021 Shared Task https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.bionlp-1.8.pdf

• April 2021: A post-challenge round  was released to allow submitting new runs on AICrowd https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/mediqa-2021

Tasks 

1) Summarization of Consumer Health Questions

Consumer health questions tend to contain numerous peripheral information that hinders automatic Question Answering (QA). Empirical QA studies based on manual expert summarization of these questions showed a substantial improvement of 58% in performance [1]. Effective automatic summarization methods for consumer health questions could therefore play a key role in enhancing medical question answering. 

The goal of this task is to promote the development of new summarization approaches that address specifically the challenges of long and potentially complex consumer health questions.  

Relevant approaches should be able to generate a condensed question expressing the minimum information required to find correct answers to the original question [2].  

2) Summarization of Multiple Answers

Different answers can bring complementary perspectives that are likely to benefit the users of QA systems. The goal of this task is to promote the development of multi-answer summarization approaches that could solve simultaneously the aggregation and summarization problems posed by multiple relevant answers to a medical question [4].

3) Summarization of Radiology Reports 

The automatic summarization of radiology reports has several clinical applications such as accelerating the radiology workflow and improving the efficiency of clinical communications. 

This task aims to promote the development of clinical summarization models that are able to generate radiology impression statements by summarizing textual findings written by radiologists [7-8].  

Datasets 

Task 1: Question Summarization

• Training Data: The MeQSum Dataset of consumer health questions and their summaries [2] could be used for training. Participants can use available external resources, including, but not limited to medical QA datasets and question focus & type recognition datasets. For instance, the CHQs Dataset [3] contains additional annotations (e.g. medical entities, question focus, question type, keywords) of the MeQSum questions.  

• Validation and Test Sets: Consist of consumer health questions received by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)  in December 2020 and their associated summaries, manually created by medical experts.  

  • The validation set is available on the MEDIQA Github project.  

  • The test set will be available for the registered participants with the official MEDIQA 2021 test sets on AIcrowd, under the Resources section. 

Task 2: Multi-Answer Summarization

• Training Data: The MEDIQA-AnS Dataset [4] could be used for training. Participants can use available external resources (e.g. existing medical QA datasets). 

• Validation and Test Sets: The original answers are generated by the medical QA system CHiQA [5] which searches for answers from only trustworthy medical information sources [6]. The summaries are manually created by medical experts. 

  • The validation set is available on the MEDIQA Github project.  

  • The test set will be available for the registered participants with the official MEDIQA 2021 test sets on AIcrowd, under the Resources section. 

Task 3: Radiology Report Summarization

• Training Data: A subset from the MIMIC-CXR Dataset [13,14] could be used for training. Instructions and scripts to download this training set are described here:  https://github.com/abachaa/MEDIQA2021/tree/main/Task3. 

• Participants can use available external resources. But, please note that the rest of the MIMIC-CXR reports as well as the Indiana dataset should not be used for training. 

• Validation set: A subset from the MIMIC-CXR and Indiana datasets, available on the MEDIQA Github project.  

• Test Set:  The test set will be available for the registered participants with the official MEDIQA 2021 test sets on AIcrowd, under the Resources section. 

Registration 

The registration & data usage agreement form is available under the Resources section of the AIcrowd projects.

The form covers the three tasks. You can download it from any of the three MEDIQA projects: QS@AIcrowd, MAS@AIcrowd & RRS@AIcrowd.  

To register, you need to complete, sign, and upload the form. When approved, you will be able to download the official test sets and to submit your runs on the AIcrowd submission systems. 

Submission & Evaluation

The AIcrowd platform will be used for releasing the test sets and submitting runs: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/mediqa-2021

• Consumer Health Question Summarization: QS@AIcrowd

• Multi-Answer Summarization: MAS@AIcrowd

• Radiology Report Summarization: RRS@AIcrowd

Submission Format for the three tasks:  

• ID [tab] Summary

• The summary must fit in one line (no line breaks)

• Each team is allowed to submit 10 runs for each task. 

Evaluation Metrics: 

ROUGE [9] will be used as the main metric to rank the participating teams [10], but we will also use  several evaluation metrics more adapted to each task such as HOLMS [11] and CheXbert [12]. 

Official Results

MEDIQA 2021: Official Results