# Region-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model via SlowFast Tokenization and Pseudo-Mask Guidance for 3D CT Report Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23102/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03714/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05868/) (2022)
- [GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03601/) (2023)
- [Generalist Foundation Models from a Multimodal Dataset for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17834/) (2024)
- [M3D: Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00578/) (2024)
- [Osprey: Pixel Understanding with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10032/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [Interactive and Explainable Region-guided Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08295/) (2023)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [GREEN: Generative Radiology Report Evaluation and Error Notation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03595/) (2024)
- [LITA: Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19046/) (2024)
- [SlowFast-LLaVA: A Strong Training-Free Baseline for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15841/) (2024)
- [Groma: Localized Visual Tokenization for Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13013/) (2024)
- [PromptMRG: Diagnosis-Driven Prompts for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12604/) (2023)
- [RegionGPT: Towards Region Understanding Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02330/) (2024)
- [Med3DVLM: An Efficient Vision-Language Model for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20047/) (2025)
- [RadGenome-Chest CT: A Grounded Vision-Language Dataset for Chest CT Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16754/) (2024)
- [RadGPT: Constructing 3D Image-Text Tumor Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04678/) (2025)
- [Dia-LLaMA: Towards Large Language Model-driven CT Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16386/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model with Region-guided Referring and Grounding for CT Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15539/) (2024)
- [Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18619/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Bilingual Multimodal Large Language Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18387/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Citrus-V: Advancing Medical Foundation Models with Unified Medical Image Grounding for Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19090/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Fine-Grained Spatial Grounding in 3D CT Report Generation via Discriminative Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10437/) (2026)
- [ORCA: ORgan-Centroid Aggregation for Training-Free 3D CT Visual Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00345/) (2026)
- [Segmentation, Detection and Explanation: A Unified Framework for CT Appearance Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15997/) (2026)
- [Volumetric Radiology AI in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20549/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Supervised Visual Representation Learning for Multi-Phenotype Lesion Interpretation in Medical VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10238/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current CT report generation frameworks predominantly rely on global feature representations, often failing to capture region-specific details and potentially missing certain abnormalities. To overcome this limitation, we propose MedRegion-CT, a region-focused multimodal large language model framework featuring three key innovations. First, we revisit the SlowFast strategy to jointly model global and fine-grained information and adapt it to the medical domain via a Region-based SlowFast Tokenizer that extracts tokens guided by clinically meaningful regions. Second, generated pseudo-masks guide the model to attend to diagnostically important anatomical regions, facilitating a systematic understanding of the overall scan context. Third, quantitative lesion information, including size, diameter, and spatial location, is encoded as structured textual prompts, enabling context-aware and clinically informed report generation. To enable rigorous evaluation, we validate our framework on multi-institutional structured report generation benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that MedRegion-CT achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing approaches in both linguistic quality and clinical accuracy. All code is publicly available at: https://github.com/babbu3682/MedRegion-CT.
