Automated Structured Radiology Report Generation with Rich Clinical Context
This work addresses a critical gap in automated radiology reporting for healthcare by reducing radiologist workload and improving clinical alignment, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SRRG methods by adding context.
The paper tackles the problem of automated structured radiology report generation (SRRG) from chest X-ray images by addressing the oversight of clinical context in existing systems, which causes issues like temporal hallucinations. The proposed contextualized SRRG (C-SRRG) incorporates rich clinical context and demonstrates significant improvements in report generation quality through benchmarking with state-of-the-art multimodal large language models.
Automated structured radiology report generation (SRRG) from chest X-ray images offers significant potential to reduce workload of radiologists by generating reports in structured formats that ensure clarity, consistency, and adherence to clinical reporting standards. While radiologists effectively utilize available clinical contexts in their diagnostic reasoning, existing SRRG systems overlook these essential elements. This fundamental gap leads to critical problems including temporal hallucinations when referencing non-existent clinical contexts. To address these limitations, we propose contextualized SRRG (C-SRRG) that comprehensively incorporates rich clinical context for SRRG. We curate C-SRRG dataset by integrating comprehensive clinical context encompassing 1) multi-view X-ray images, 2) clinical indication, 3) imaging techniques, and 4) prior studies with corresponding comparisons based on patient histories. Through extensive benchmarking with state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, we demonstrate that incorporating clinical context with the proposed C-SRRG significantly improves report generation quality. We publicly release dataset, code, and checkpoints to facilitate future research for clinically-aligned automated RRG at https://github.com/vuno/contextualized-srrg.