# Improving Radiology Report Generation Systems by Removing Hallucinated References to Non-existent Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09167/) (2020)
- [RadGraph: Extracting Clinical Entities and Relations from Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14463/) (2021)
- [On the Automatic Generation of Medical Imaging Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08195/) (2017)
- [GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12592/) (2020)
- [Improving Factual Completeness and Consistency of Image-to-Text Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10042/) (2020)
- [TieNet: Text-Image Embedding Network for Common Thorax Disease Classification and Reporting in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04334/) (2018)
- [Clinically Accurate Chest X-Ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02633/) (2019)
- [Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00969/) (2020)
- [Large Scale Automated Reading of Frontal and Lateral Chest X-Rays using Dual Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07839/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Towards Generalist Biomedical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14334/) (2023)
- [Learning to Exploit Temporal Structure for Biomedical Vision-Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04558/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [GREEN: Generative Radiology Report Evaluation and Error Notation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03595/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models for Medical Report Generation and Visual Question Answering: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02469/) (2024)
- [MAIRA-1: A specialised large multimodal model for radiology report generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13668/) (2023)
- [Advances in Medical Image Analysis with Vision Transformers: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03505/) (2023)
- [Large AI Models in Health Informatics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11568/) (2023)
- [Towards a clinically accessible radiology foundation model: open-access and lightweight, with automated evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08002/) (2024)
- [Automated Radiology Report Generation: A Review of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10842/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Image-Text Matching Improves Retrieval-based Chest X-Ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17579/) (2023)
- [HERGen: Elevating Radiology Report Generation with Longitudinal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15158/) (2024)
- [Retrieval Augmented Chest X-Ray Report Generation using OpenAI GPT models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03660/) (2023)
- [Controllable Chest X-Ray Report Generation from Longitudinal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05881/) (2023)
- [Fact-Aware Multimodal Retrieval Augmentation for Accurate Medical Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15268/) (2024)
- [RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13864/) (2023)
- [ChEX: Interactive Localization and Region Description in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15770/) (2024)
- [Advancing human-centric AI for robust X-ray analysis through holistic self-supervised learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01469/) (2024)
- [FineRadScore: A Radiology Report Line-by-Line Evaluation Technique Generating Corrections with Severity Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20613/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Trustworthiness in Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15851/) (2024)
- [RadFlag: A Black-Box Hallucination Detection Method for Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00299/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Generative Model for View-Specific Chest X-ray Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12172/) (2023)
- [RADAR: Enhancing Radiology Report Generation with Supplementary Knowledge Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14318/) (2025)
- [Pragmatic Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17154/) (2023)
- [Consensus, dissensus and synergy between clinicians and specialist foundation models in radiology report generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18260/) (2023)
- [RadAlign: Advancing Radiology Report Generation with Vision-Language Concept Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07525/) (2025)
- [CXR-Agent: Vision-language models for chest X-ray interpretation with uncertainty aware radiology reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08811/) (2024)
- [ReXErr: Synthesizing Clinically Meaningful Errors in Diagnostic Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10829/) (2024)
- [DDaTR: Dynamic Difference-aware Temporal Residual Network for Longitudinal Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03401/) (2025)
- [Direct Preference Optimization for Suppressing Hallucinated Prior Exams in Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06496/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current deep learning models trained to generate radiology reports from chest radiographs are capable of producing clinically accurate, clear, and actionable text that can advance patient care. However, such systems all succumb to the same problem: making hallucinated references to non-existent prior reports. Such hallucinations occur because these models are trained on datasets of real-world patient reports that inherently refer to priors. To this end, we propose two methods to remove references to priors in radiology reports: (1) a GPT-3-based few-shot approach to rewrite medical reports without references to priors; and (2) a BioBERT-based token classification approach to directly remove words referring to priors. We use the aforementioned approaches to modify MIMIC-CXR, a publicly available dataset of chest X-rays and their associated free-text radiology reports; we then retrain CXR-RePaiR, a radiology report generation system, on the adapted MIMIC-CXR dataset. We find that our re-trained model--which we call CXR-ReDonE--outperforms previous report generation methods on clinical metrics, achieving an average BERTScore of 0.2351 (2.57% absolute improvement). We expect our approach to be broadly valuable in enabling current radiology report generation systems to be more directly integrated into clinical pipelines.