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Main Authors: Mao, Yuren, Xu, Wenyi, Qin, Yuyang, Gao, Yunjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16229
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author Mao, Yuren
Xu, Wenyi
Qin, Yuyang
Gao, Yunjun
author_facet Mao, Yuren
Xu, Wenyi
Qin, Yuyang
Gao, Yunjun
contents Computed Tomography (CT) scan, which produces 3D volumetric medical data that can be viewed as hundreds of cross-sectional images (a.k.a. slices), provides detailed anatomical information for diagnosis. For radiologists, creating CT radiology reports is time-consuming and error-prone. A visual question answering (VQA) system that can answer radiologists' questions about some anatomical regions on the CT scan and even automatically generate a radiology report is urgently needed. However, existing VQA systems cannot adequately handle the CT radiology question answering (CTQA) task for: (1) anatomic complexity makes CT images difficult to understand; (2) spatial relationship across hundreds slices is difficult to capture. To address these issues, this paper proposes CT-Agent, a multimodal agentic framework for CTQA. CT-Agent adopts anatomically independent tools to break down the anatomic complexity; furthermore, it efficiently captures the across-slice spatial relationship with a global-local token compression strategy. Experimental results on two 3D chest CT datasets, CT-RATE and RadGenome-ChestCT, verify the superior performance of CT-Agent.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CT-Agent: A Multimodal-LLM Agent for 3D CT Radiology Question Answering
Mao, Yuren
Xu, Wenyi
Qin, Yuyang
Gao, Yunjun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computed Tomography (CT) scan, which produces 3D volumetric medical data that can be viewed as hundreds of cross-sectional images (a.k.a. slices), provides detailed anatomical information for diagnosis. For radiologists, creating CT radiology reports is time-consuming and error-prone. A visual question answering (VQA) system that can answer radiologists' questions about some anatomical regions on the CT scan and even automatically generate a radiology report is urgently needed. However, existing VQA systems cannot adequately handle the CT radiology question answering (CTQA) task for: (1) anatomic complexity makes CT images difficult to understand; (2) spatial relationship across hundreds slices is difficult to capture. To address these issues, this paper proposes CT-Agent, a multimodal agentic framework for CTQA. CT-Agent adopts anatomically independent tools to break down the anatomic complexity; furthermore, it efficiently captures the across-slice spatial relationship with a global-local token compression strategy. Experimental results on two 3D chest CT datasets, CT-RATE and RadGenome-ChestCT, verify the superior performance of CT-Agent.
title CT-Agent: A Multimodal-LLM Agent for 3D CT Radiology Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16229