ChatRadio-Valuer: A Chat Large Language Model for Generalizable Radiology Report Generation Based on Multi-institution and Multi-system Data

Radiology report generation, as a key step in medical image analysis, is critical to the quantitative analysis of clinically informed decision-making levels. However, complex and diverse radiology reports with cross-source heterogeneity pose a huge generalizability challenge to the current methods under massive data volume, mainly because the style and normativity of radiology reports are obviously distinctive among institutions, body regions inspected and radiologists. Recently, the advent of large language models (LLM) offers great potential for recognizing signs of health conditions. To resolve the above problem, we collaborate with the Second Xiangya Hospital in China and propose ChatRadio-Valuer based on the LLM, a tailored model for automatic radiology report generation that learns generalizable representations and provides a basis pattern for model adaptation in sophisticated analysts' cases. Specifically, ChatRadio-Valuer is trained based on the radiology reports from a single institution by means of supervised fine-tuning, and then adapted to disease diagnosis tasks for human multi-system evaluation (i.e., chest, abdomen, muscle-skeleton, head, and maxillofacial $\&$ neck) from six different institutions in clinical-level events. The clinical dataset utilized in this study encompasses a remarkable total of \textbf{332,673} observations. From the comprehensive results on engineering indicators, clinical efficacy and deployment cost metrics, it can be shown that ChatRadio-Valuer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, especially ChatGPT (GPT-3.5-Turbo) and GPT-4 et al., in terms of the diseases diagnosis from radiology reports. ChatRadio-Valuer provides an effective avenue to boost model generalization performance and alleviate the annotation workload of experts to enable the promotion of clinical AI applications in radiology reports.

Evaluating Large Language Models for Radiology Natural Language Processing

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has marked a pivotal shift in the field of natural language processing (NLP). LLMs have revolutionized a multitude of domains, and they have made a significant impact in the medical field. Large language models are now more abundant than ever, and many of these models exhibit bilingual capabilities, proficient in both English and Chinese. However, a comprehensive evaluation of these models remains to be conducted. This lack of assessment is especially apparent within the context of radiology NLP. This study seeks to bridge this gap by critically evaluating thirty two LLMs in interpreting radiology reports, a crucial component of radiology NLP. Specifically, the ability to derive impressions from radiologic findings is assessed. The outcomes of this evaluation provide key insights into the performance, strengths, and weaknesses of these LLMs, informing their practical applications within the medical domain.