RadTimeline: Timeline Summarization for Longitudinal Radiological Lung Findings

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Sitong, Yetisgen, Meliha, Ostendorf, Mari
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhou, Sitong
Yetisgen, Meliha
Ostendorf, Mari
author_facet Zhou, Sitong
Yetisgen, Meliha
Ostendorf, Mari
contents Tracking findings in longitudinal radiology reports is crucial for accurately identifying disease progression, and the time-consuming process would benefit from automatic summarization. This work introduces a structured summarization task, where we frame longitudinal report summarization as a timeline generation task, with dated findings organized in columns and temporally related findings grouped in rows. This structured summarization format enables straightforward comparison of findings across time and facilitates fact-checking against the associated reports. The timeline is generated using a 3-step LLM process of extracting findings, generating group names, and using the names to group the findings. To evaluate such systems, we create RadTimeline, a timeline dataset focused on tracking lung-related radiologic findings in chest-related imaging reports. Experiments on RadTimeline show tradeoffs of different-sized LLMs and prompting strategies. Our results highlight that group name generation as an intermediate step is critical for effective finding grouping. The best configuration has some irrelevant findings but very good recall, and grouping performance is comparable to human annotators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22820
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RadTimeline: Timeline Summarization for Longitudinal Radiological Lung Findings
Zhou, Sitong
Yetisgen, Meliha
Ostendorf, Mari
Computation and Language
Tracking findings in longitudinal radiology reports is crucial for accurately identifying disease progression, and the time-consuming process would benefit from automatic summarization. This work introduces a structured summarization task, where we frame longitudinal report summarization as a timeline generation task, with dated findings organized in columns and temporally related findings grouped in rows. This structured summarization format enables straightforward comparison of findings across time and facilitates fact-checking against the associated reports. The timeline is generated using a 3-step LLM process of extracting findings, generating group names, and using the names to group the findings. To evaluate such systems, we create RadTimeline, a timeline dataset focused on tracking lung-related radiologic findings in chest-related imaging reports. Experiments on RadTimeline show tradeoffs of different-sized LLMs and prompting strategies. Our results highlight that group name generation as an intermediate step is critical for effective finding grouping. The best configuration has some irrelevant findings but very good recall, and grouping performance is comparable to human annotators.
title RadTimeline: Timeline Summarization for Longitudinal Radiological Lung Findings
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22820