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Main Authors: Dong, Owen, Gao, Lily, Kota, Manish, Landmana, Bennett A., Bekvalac, Jelena, Western, Gaynor, Van Schaik, Katherine D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03750
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author Dong, Owen
Gao, Lily
Kota, Manish
Landmana, Bennett A.
Bekvalac, Jelena
Western, Gaynor
Van Schaik, Katherine D.
author_facet Dong, Owen
Gao, Lily
Kota, Manish
Landmana, Bennett A.
Bekvalac, Jelena
Western, Gaynor
Van Schaik, Katherine D.
contents Paleoradiology, the use of modern imaging technologies to study archaeological and anthropological remains, offers new windows on millennial scale patterns of human health. Unfortunately, the radiographs collected during field campaigns are heterogeneous: bones are disarticulated, positioning is ad hoc, and laterality markers are often absent. Additionally, factors such as age at death, age of bone, sex, and imaging equipment introduce high variability. Thus, content navigation, such as identifying a subset of images with a specific projection view, can be time consuming and difficult, making efficient triaging a bottleneck for expert analysis. We report a zero shot prompting strategy that leverages a state of the art Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) to automatically identify the main bone, projection view, and laterality in such images. Our pipeline converts raw DICOM files to bone windowed PNGs, submits them to the LVLM with a carefully engineered prompt, and receives structured JSON outputs, which are extracted and formatted onto a spreadsheet in preparation for validation. On a random sample of 100 images reviewed by an expert board certified paleoradiologist, the system achieved 92% main bone accuracy, 80% projection view accuracy, and 100% laterality accuracy, with low or medium confidence flags for ambiguous cases. These results suggest that LVLMs can substantially accelerate code word development for large paleoradiology datasets, allowing for efficient content navigation in future anthropology workflows.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03750
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-shot large vision-language model prompting for automated bone identification in paleoradiology x-ray archives
Dong, Owen
Gao, Lily
Kota, Manish
Landmana, Bennett A.
Bekvalac, Jelena
Western, Gaynor
Van Schaik, Katherine D.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Paleoradiology, the use of modern imaging technologies to study archaeological and anthropological remains, offers new windows on millennial scale patterns of human health. Unfortunately, the radiographs collected during field campaigns are heterogeneous: bones are disarticulated, positioning is ad hoc, and laterality markers are often absent. Additionally, factors such as age at death, age of bone, sex, and imaging equipment introduce high variability. Thus, content navigation, such as identifying a subset of images with a specific projection view, can be time consuming and difficult, making efficient triaging a bottleneck for expert analysis. We report a zero shot prompting strategy that leverages a state of the art Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) to automatically identify the main bone, projection view, and laterality in such images. Our pipeline converts raw DICOM files to bone windowed PNGs, submits them to the LVLM with a carefully engineered prompt, and receives structured JSON outputs, which are extracted and formatted onto a spreadsheet in preparation for validation. On a random sample of 100 images reviewed by an expert board certified paleoradiologist, the system achieved 92% main bone accuracy, 80% projection view accuracy, and 100% laterality accuracy, with low or medium confidence flags for ambiguous cases. These results suggest that LVLMs can substantially accelerate code word development for large paleoradiology datasets, allowing for efficient content navigation in future anthropology workflows.
title Zero-shot large vision-language model prompting for automated bone identification in paleoradiology x-ray archives
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03750