RadPhi-3: Small Language Models for Radiology

LLM based copilot assistants are useful in everyday tasks. There is a proliferation in the exploration of AI assistant use cases to support radiology workflows in a reliable manner. In this work, we present RadPhi-3, a Small Language Model instruction tuned from Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct with 3.8B parameters to assist with various tasks in radiology workflows. While impression summary generation has been the primary task which has been explored in prior works w.r.t radiology reports of Chest X-rays, we also explore other useful tasks like change summary generation comparing the current radiology report and its prior report, section extraction from radiology reports, tagging the reports with various pathologies and tubes, lines or devices present in them etc. In-addition, instruction tuning RadPhi-3 involved learning from a credible knowledge source used by radiologists, Radiopaedia.org. RadPhi-3 can be used both to give reliable answers for radiology related queries as well as perform useful tasks related to radiology reports. RadPhi-3 achieves SOTA results on the RaLEs radiology report generation benchmark.

MAIRA-Seg: Enhancing Radiology Report Generation with Segmentation-Aware Multimodal Large Language Models

There is growing interest in applying AI to radiology report generation, particularly for chest X-rays (CXRs). This paper investigates whether incorporating pixel-level information through segmentation masks can improve fine-grained image interpretation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for radiology report generation. We introduce MAIRA-Seg, a segmentation-aware MLLM framework designed to utilize semantic segmentation masks alongside CXRs for generating radiology reports. We train expert segmentation models to obtain mask pseudolabels for radiology-specific structures in CXRs. Subsequently, building on the architectures of MAIRA, a CXR-specialised model for report generation, we integrate a trainable segmentation tokens extractor that leverages these mask pseudolabels, and employ mask-aware prompting to generate draft radiology reports. Our experiments on the publicly available MIMIC-CXR dataset show that MAIRA-Seg outperforms non-segmentation baselines. We also investigate set-of-marks prompting with MAIRA and find that MAIRA-Seg consistently demonstrates comparable or superior performance. The results confirm that using segmentation masks enhances the nuanced reasoning of MLLMs, potentially contributing to better clinical outcomes.

MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation

Radiology reporting is a complex task that requires detailed image understanding, integration of multiple inputs, including comparison with prior imaging, and precise language generation. This makes it ideal for the development and use of generative multimodal models. Here, we extend report generation to include the localisation of individual findings on the image - a task we call grounded report generation. Prior work indicates that grounding is important for clarifying image understanding and interpreting AI-generated text. Therefore, grounded reporting stands to improve the utility and transparency of automated report drafting. To enable evaluation of grounded reporting, we propose a novel evaluation framework - RadFact - leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). RadFact assesses the factuality of individual generated sentences, as well as correctness of generated spatial localisations when present. We introduce MAIRA-2, a large multimodal model combining a radiology-specific image encoder with a LLM, and trained for the new task of grounded report generation on chest X-rays. MAIRA-2 uses more comprehensive inputs than explored previously: the current frontal image, the current lateral image, the prior frontal image and prior report, as well as the Indication, Technique and Comparison sections of the current report. We demonstrate that these additions significantly improve report quality and reduce hallucinations, establishing a new state of the art on findings generation (without grounding) on MIMIC-CXR while demonstrating the feasibility of grounded reporting as a novel and richer task.

RAD-PHI2: Instruction Tuning PHI-2 for Radiology

Small Language Models (SLMs) have shown remarkable performance in general domain language understanding, reasoning and coding tasks, but their capabilities in the medical domain, particularly concerning radiology text, is less explored. In this study, we investigate the application of SLMs for general radiology knowledge specifically question answering related to understanding of symptoms, radiological appearances of findings, differential diagnosis, assessing prognosis, and suggesting treatments w.r.t diseases pertaining to different organ systems. Additionally, we explore the utility of SLMs in handling text-related tasks with respect to radiology reports within AI-driven radiology workflows. We fine-tune Phi-2, a SLM with 2.7 billion parameters using high-quality educational content from Radiopaedia, a collaborative online radiology resource. The resulting language model, RadPhi-2-Base, exhibits the ability to address general radiology queries across various systems (e.g., chest, cardiac). Furthermore, we investigate Phi-2 for instruction tuning, enabling it to perform specific tasks. By fine-tuning Phi-2 on both general domain tasks and radiology-specific tasks related to chest X-ray reports, we create Rad-Phi2. Our empirical results reveal that Rad-Phi2 Base and Rad-Phi2 perform comparably or even outperform larger models such as Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 and GPT-4 providing concise and precise answers. In summary, our work demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of utilizing SLMs in radiology workflows both for knowledge related queries as well as for performing specific tasks related to radiology reports thereby opening up new avenues for enhancing the quality and efficiency of radiology practice.

MAIRA-1: A specialised large multimodal model for radiology report generation

We present a radiology-specific multimodal model for the task for generating radiological reports from chest X-rays (CXRs). Our work builds on the idea that large language model(s) can be equipped with multimodal capabilities through alignment with pre-trained vision encoders. On natural images, this has been shown to allow multimodal models to gain image understanding and description capabilities. Our proposed model (MAIRA-1) leverages a CXR-specific image encoder in conjunction with a fine-tuned large language model based on Vicuna-7B, and text-based data augmentation, to produce reports with state-of-the-art quality. In particular, MAIRA-1 significantly improves on the radiologist-aligned RadCliQ metric and across all lexical metrics considered. Manual review of model outputs demonstrates promising fluency and accuracy of generated reports while uncovering failure modes not captured by existing evaluation practices. More information and resources can be found on the project website: https://aka.ms/maira.