# Interactive and Explainable Region-guided Radiology Report Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08295/

## Key facts

- Cited by 140 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08226/) (2019)
- [CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09167/) (2020)
- [Image Captioning with Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03925/) (2016)
- [On the Automatic Generation of Medical Imaging Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08195/) (2017)
- [Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13258/) (2022)
- [DenseCap: Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07571/) (2015)
- [Exploring and Distilling Posterior and Prior Knowledge for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06963/) (2021)
- [When Radiology Report Generation Meets Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08277/) (2020)
- [Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Reinforced Agent for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08298/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Improving Chest X-Ray Report Generation by Leveraging Warm Starting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09405/) (2022)
- [Chest ImaGenome Dataset for Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00316/) (2021)
- [Say As You Wish: Fine-grained Control of Image Caption Generation with Abstract Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00387/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06965/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 140)

- [Towards Generalist Biomedical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14334/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [R2GenGPT: Radiology Report Generation with Frozen LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09812/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10833/) (2024)
- [PromptMRG: Diagnosis-Driven Prompts for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12604/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-1: A specialised large multimodal model for radiology report generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13668/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Foundation Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10729/) (2024)
- [MedImageInsight: An Open-Source Embedding Model for General Domain Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06542/) (2024)
- [Automated Radiology Report Generation: A Review of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10842/) (2024)
- [Enhanced Contrastive Learning with Multi-view Longitudinal Data for Chest X-ray Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20056/) (2025)
- [CXPMRG-Bench: Pre-training and Benchmarking for X-ray Medical Report Generation on CheXpert Plus Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00379/) (2024)
- [HERGen: Elevating Radiology Report Generation with Longitudinal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15158/) (2024)
- [GEMeX: A Large-Scale, Groundable, and Explainable Medical VQA Benchmark for Chest X-ray Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16778/) (2024)
- [Libra: Leveraging Temporal Images for Biomedical Radiology Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19378/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model with Region-guided Referring and Grounding for CT Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15539/) (2024)
- [ReXGradient-160K: A Large-Scale Publicly Available Dataset of Chest Radiographs with Free-text Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00228/) (2025)
- [An X-Ray Is Worth 15 Features: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03334/) (2024)
- [ReXrank: A Public Leaderboard for AI-Powered Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15122/) (2024)
- [RadVLM: A Multitask Conversational Vision-Language Model for Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03333/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Bilingual Multimodal Large Language Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18387/) (2024)
- [Controllable Chest X-Ray Report Generation from Longitudinal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05881/) (2023)
- [RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13864/) (2023)
- [Complex Organ Mask Guided Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02329/) (2023)
- [The Impact of Imperfect XAI on Human-AI Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13566/) (2023)
- [Better Tokens for Better 3D: Advancing Vision-Language Modeling in 3D Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20639/) (2025)
- [ChEX: Interactive Localization and Region Description in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15770/) (2024)
- [Self-eXplainable AI for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02331/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Trustworthiness in Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15851/) (2024)
- [M4CXR: Exploring Multi-task Potentials of Multi-modal Large Language Models for Chest X-ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16213/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Model driven Radiology Report Generation with Clinical Knowledge Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06728/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The automatic generation of radiology reports has the potential to assist radiologists in the time-consuming task of report writing. Existing methods generate the full report from image-level features, failing to explicitly focus on anatomical regions in the image. We propose a simple yet effective region-guided report generation model that detects anatomical regions and then describes individual, salient regions to form the final report. While previous methods generate reports without the possibility of human intervention and with limited explainability, our method opens up novel clinical use cases through additional interactive capabilities and introduces a high degree of transparency and explainability. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness in report generation, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models, and highlight its interactive capabilities. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ttanida/rgrg .