# Boosting Radiology Report Generation by Infusing Comparison Prior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04561 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04561/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [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)
- [On the Automatic Generation of Medical Imaging Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08195/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Knowledge-driven Encode, Retrieve, Paraphrase for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10122/) (2019)
- [Automatic Radiology Report Generation based on Multi-view Image Fusion and Medical Concept Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09085/) (2019)
- [MDNet: A Semantically and Visually Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02485/) (2017)
- [Improving Radiology Report Generation Systems by Removing Hallucinated References to Non-existent Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06340/) (2022)
- [Progressive Transformer-Based Generation of Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09777/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Automated Radiology Report Generation: A Review of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10842/) (2024)
- [RadVLM: A Multitask Conversational Vision-Language Model for Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03333/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Generation in Healthcare: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04073/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent transformer-based models have made significant strides in generating radiology reports from chest X-ray images. However, a prominent challenge remains: these models often lack prior knowledge, resulting in the generation of synthetic reports that mistakenly reference non-existent prior exams. This discrepancy can be attributed to a knowledge gap between radiologists and the generation models. While radiologists possess patient-specific prior information, the models solely receive X-ray images at a specific time point. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach that leverages a rule-based labeler to extract comparison prior information from radiology reports. This extracted comparison prior is then seamlessly integrated into state-of-the-art transformer-based models, enabling them to produce more realistic and comprehensive reports. Our method is evaluated on English report datasets, such as IU X-ray and MIMIC-CXR. The results demonstrate that our approach surpasses baseline models in terms of natural language generation metrics. Notably, our model generates reports that are free from false references to non-existent prior exams, setting it apart from previous models. By addressing this limitation, our approach represents a significant step towards bridging the gap between radiologists and generation models in the domain of medical report generation.