In a tool for assisting in summarizing salient medical report findings, finding tokens (66) representing findings are extracted from a current medical report, and a salience value is computed for each such finding token based on statistics for the finding token in a reference database (32) including a count of reference medical reports of the containing the finding token in a report summary section and a count of reference medical reports containing the finding token anywhere in the report. A ranking or sub-set of findings extracted from the current medical report is displayed. The displayed findings may be ranked, or the sub-set chosen, by salience value. To generate the reference database, for each reference medical report (42) finding tokens (46) are extracted and it is determined whether each such finding token is salient based on whether the finding token is extracted from a report summary section of the reference report.