Impressions in a radiology report is a summary that represents the radiologist’s reasoning and conclusion on an imaging study, and it also aids the referring physician in confirming or excluding certain diagnoses.

A cascade of tasks is required to automatically generate abstract impressions of the typical information-rich radiology report.

To explore the cascade structure and explainability of radiology report summarization, we utilize the two-step approach (extractive summarization followed by abstractive summarization) with an additional breakdown of the extractive part into independent tasks such as extraction of salient sentences and keywords.