Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG: Towards Interpretable and Accurate Radiology Report Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Salmè, Marco, Siciliano, Federico, Silvestri, Fabrizio, Soda, Paolo, Sicilia, Rosa, Guarrasi, Valerio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Salmè, Marco
Siciliano, Federico
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Soda, Paolo
Sicilia, Rosa
Guarrasi, Valerio
author_facet Salmè, Marco
Siciliano, Federico
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Soda, Paolo
Sicilia, Rosa
Guarrasi, Valerio
contents Radiology Report Generation (RRG) through Vision-Language Models (VLMs) promises to reduce documentation burden, improve reporting consistency, and accelerate clinical workflows. However, their clinical adoption remains limited by the lack of interpretability and the tendency to hallucinate findings misaligned with imaging evidence. Existing research typically treats interpretability and accuracy as separate objectives, with concept-based explainability techniques focusing primarily on transparency, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods targeting factual grounding through external retrieval. We present Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG (CEMRAG), a unified framework that decomposes visual representations into interpretable clinical concepts and integrates them with multimodal RAG. This approach exploits enriched contextual prompts for RRG, improving both interpretability and factual accuracy. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray across multiple VLM architectures, training regimes, and retrieval configurations demonstrate consistent improvements over both conventional RAG and concept-only baselines on clinical accuracy metrics and standard NLP measures. These results challenge the assumed trade-off between interpretability and performance, showing that transparent visual concepts can enhance rather than compromise diagnostic accuracy in medical VLMs. Our modular design decomposes interpretability into visual transparency and structured language model conditioning, providing a principled pathway toward clinically trustworthy AI-assisted radiology.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_15650
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG: Towards Interpretable and Accurate Radiology Report Generation
Salmè, Marco
Siciliano, Federico
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Soda, Paolo
Sicilia, Rosa
Guarrasi, Valerio
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Radiology Report Generation (RRG) through Vision-Language Models (VLMs) promises to reduce documentation burden, improve reporting consistency, and accelerate clinical workflows. However, their clinical adoption remains limited by the lack of interpretability and the tendency to hallucinate findings misaligned with imaging evidence. Existing research typically treats interpretability and accuracy as separate objectives, with concept-based explainability techniques focusing primarily on transparency, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods targeting factual grounding through external retrieval. We present Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG (CEMRAG), a unified framework that decomposes visual representations into interpretable clinical concepts and integrates them with multimodal RAG. This approach exploits enriched contextual prompts for RRG, improving both interpretability and factual accuracy. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray across multiple VLM architectures, training regimes, and retrieval configurations demonstrate consistent improvements over both conventional RAG and concept-only baselines on clinical accuracy metrics and standard NLP measures. These results challenge the assumed trade-off between interpretability and performance, showing that transparent visual concepts can enhance rather than compromise diagnostic accuracy in medical VLMs. Our modular design decomposes interpretability into visual transparency and structured language model conditioning, providing a principled pathway toward clinically trustworthy AI-assisted radiology.
title Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG: Towards Interpretable and Accurate Radiology Report Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15650