TRACE: Temporal Radiology with Anatomical Change Explanation for Grounded X-ray Report Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Aranya, OFM Riaz Rahman, Desai, Kevin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Aranya, OFM Riaz Rahman
Desai, Kevin
author_facet Aranya, OFM Riaz Rahman
Desai, Kevin
contents Temporal comparison of chest X-rays is fundamental to clinical radiology, enabling detection of disease progression, treatment response, and new findings. While vision-language models have advanced single-image report generation and visual grounding, no existing method combines these capabilities for temporal change detection. We introduce Temporal Radiology with Anatomical Change Explanation (TRACE), the first model that jointly performs temporal comparison, change classification, and spatial localization. Given a prior and current chest X-ray, TRACE generates natural language descriptions of interval changes (worsened, improved, stable) while grounding each finding with bounding box coordinates. TRACE demonstrates effective spatial localization with over 90% grounding accuracy, establishing a foundation for this challenging new task. Our ablation study uncovers an emergent capability: change detection arises only when temporal comparison and spatial grounding are jointly learned, as neither alone enables meaningful change detection. This finding suggests that grounding provides a spatial attention mechanism essential for temporal reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02963
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TRACE: Temporal Radiology with Anatomical Change Explanation for Grounded X-ray Report Generation
Aranya, OFM Riaz Rahman
Desai, Kevin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Temporal comparison of chest X-rays is fundamental to clinical radiology, enabling detection of disease progression, treatment response, and new findings. While vision-language models have advanced single-image report generation and visual grounding, no existing method combines these capabilities for temporal change detection. We introduce Temporal Radiology with Anatomical Change Explanation (TRACE), the first model that jointly performs temporal comparison, change classification, and spatial localization. Given a prior and current chest X-ray, TRACE generates natural language descriptions of interval changes (worsened, improved, stable) while grounding each finding with bounding box coordinates. TRACE demonstrates effective spatial localization with over 90% grounding accuracy, establishing a foundation for this challenging new task. Our ablation study uncovers an emergent capability: change detection arises only when temporal comparison and spatial grounding are jointly learned, as neither alone enables meaningful change detection. This finding suggests that grounding provides a spatial attention mechanism essential for temporal reasoning.
title TRACE: Temporal Radiology with Anatomical Change Explanation for Grounded X-ray Report Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02963