Abstract:In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across various medical applications. Building on this foundation, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate LLMs with visual models to process diverse inputs, including clinical data and medical images. In ophthalmology, LLMs have been explored for analyzing optical coherence tomography (OCT) reports, assisting in disease classification, and even predicting treatment outcomes. However, existing MLLM benchmarks often fail to capture the complexities of real-world clinical practice, particularly in the analysis of OCT images. Many suffer from limitations such as small sample sizes, a lack of diverse OCT datasets, and insufficient expert validation. These shortcomings hinder the accurate assessment of MLLMs' ability to interpret OCT scans and their broader applicability in ophthalmology. Our dataset, curated through rigorous quality control and expert annotation, consists of 439 fundus images and 75 OCT images. Using a standardized API-based framework, we assessed seven mainstream MLLMs and observed significant variability in diagnostic accuracy across different diseases. While some models performed well in diagnosing conditions such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, they struggled with others, including choroidal neovascularization and myopia, highlighting inconsistencies in performance and the need for further refinement. Our findings emphasize the importance of developing clinically relevant benchmarks to provide a more accurate assessment of MLLMs' capabilities. By refining these models and expanding their scope, we can enhance their potential to transform ophthalmic diagnosis and treatment.
Abstract:Medical imaging quality control (QC) is essential for accurate diagnosis, yet traditional QC methods remain labor-intensive and subjective. To address this challenge, in this study, we establish a standardized dataset and evaluation framework for medical imaging QC, systematically assessing large language models (LLMs) in image quality assessment and report standardization. Specifically, we first constructed and anonymized a dataset of 161 chest X-ray (CXR) radiographs and 219 CT reports for evaluation. Then, multiple LLMs, including Gemini 2.0-Flash, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-R1, were evaluated based on recall, precision, and F1 score to detect technical errors and inconsistencies. Experimental results show that Gemini 2.0-Flash achieved a Macro F1 score of 90 in CXR tasks, demonstrating strong generalization but limited fine-grained performance. DeepSeek-R1 excelled in CT report auditing with a 62.23\% recall rate, outperforming other models. However, its distilled variants performed poorly, while InternLM2.5-7B-chat exhibited the highest additional discovery rate, indicating broader but less precise error detection. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs in medical imaging QC, with DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0-Flash demonstrating superior performance.