# SGRNet: Spatially Guided Radiology Network for Structured Radiological Reporting of Head and Neck Cancer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29153 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29153/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05868/) (2022)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [Generalist Foundation Models from a Multimodal Dataset for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17834/) (2024)
- [CT2Rep: Automated Radiology Report Generation for 3D Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06801/) (2024)
- [Automatic Radiology Report Generation based on Multi-view Image Fusion and Medical Concept Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09085/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Nuclei Segmentation Using Partial Points Annotation in Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05448/) (2020)
- [Vision Foundation Models for Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09001/) (2025)
- [Going to Extremes: Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11988/) (2020)
- [3D-CT-GPT: Generating 3D Radiology Reports through Integration of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19330/) (2024)
- [Weakly-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Gaze Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07406/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal and Multi-centric Head and Neck Cancer Dataset for Segmentation, Diagnosis and Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00367/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated radiological report generation can alleviate clinical workloads and eliminate observer variability. However, standard free-text generation models pose hallucination risks in dense regions and fail under data scarcity. We address these challenges in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) from contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) imaging. To enforce factual safety, we reformulate report generation as an anatomically grounded, multi-label, structured reporting task, predicting localized tumor involvement across a hierarchical clinical schema. To bridge the visual gap from missing metabolic imaging (e.g., PET), we introduce SGRNet (Spatially Guided Radiology Network), incorporating two low-cost spatial priors: automated organ segmentations and weakly supervised tumor localization maps modeled via 3D Gaussian heatmaps. These priors are dynamically integrated via spatial feature modulation to guide the network toward subtle tumor-induced structural alterations. Evaluated on a multi-centric dataset of 184 paired HNC CECT volumes and reports, on five clinically salient, densely packed anatomical subsites, SGRNet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.60, an 8.8 percentage-point absolute improvement over strong volume-only 3D baselines.
