RIHA: Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment for Radiology Report Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chen, Yucheng, Yu, Yang, Shi, Yufei, Xiong, Conghao, Yang, Xulei, Yeo, Si Yong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866915970577072128
author Chen, Yucheng
Yu, Yang
Shi, Yufei
Xiong, Conghao
Yang, Xulei
Yeo, Si Yong
author_facet Chen, Yucheng
Yu, Yang
Shi, Yufei
Xiong, Conghao
Yang, Xulei
Yeo, Si Yong
contents Radiology report generation (RRG) has emerged as a promising approach to alleviate radiologists' workload and reduce human errors by automatically generating diagnostic reports from medical images. A key challenge in RRG is achieving fine-grained alignment between complex visual features and the hierarchical structure of long-form radiology reports. Although recent methods have improved image-text representation learning, they often treat reports as flat sequences, overlooking their structured sections and semantic hierarchies. This simplification hinders precise cross-modal alignment and weakens RRG accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose RIHA (Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment Transformer), a novel end-to-end framework that performs multi-level alignment between radiological images and their corresponding reports across paragraph, sentence, and word levels. This hierarchical alignment enables more precise cross-modal mapping, essential for capturing the nuanced semantics embedded in clinical narratives. Specifically, RIHA introduces a Visual Feature Pyramid (VFP) to extract multi-scale visual features and a Text Feature Pyramid (TFP) to represent multi-granularity textual structures. These components are integrated through a Cross-modal Hierarchical Alignment (CHA) module, leveraging optimal transport to effectively align visual and textual features across various levels. Furthermore, we incorporate Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) into the decoder to model spatial and semantic relationships among tokens, enhancing the token-level alignment between visual features and generated text. Extensive experiments on two benchmark chest X-ray datasets, IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR, demonstrate that RIHA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RIHA: Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment for Radiology Report Generation
Chen, Yucheng
Yu, Yang
Shi, Yufei
Xiong, Conghao
Yang, Xulei
Yeo, Si Yong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Radiology report generation (RRG) has emerged as a promising approach to alleviate radiologists' workload and reduce human errors by automatically generating diagnostic reports from medical images. A key challenge in RRG is achieving fine-grained alignment between complex visual features and the hierarchical structure of long-form radiology reports. Although recent methods have improved image-text representation learning, they often treat reports as flat sequences, overlooking their structured sections and semantic hierarchies. This simplification hinders precise cross-modal alignment and weakens RRG accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose RIHA (Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment Transformer), a novel end-to-end framework that performs multi-level alignment between radiological images and their corresponding reports across paragraph, sentence, and word levels. This hierarchical alignment enables more precise cross-modal mapping, essential for capturing the nuanced semantics embedded in clinical narratives. Specifically, RIHA introduces a Visual Feature Pyramid (VFP) to extract multi-scale visual features and a Text Feature Pyramid (TFP) to represent multi-granularity textual structures. These components are integrated through a Cross-modal Hierarchical Alignment (CHA) module, leveraging optimal transport to effectively align visual and textual features across various levels. Furthermore, we incorporate Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) into the decoder to model spatial and semantic relationships among tokens, enhancing the token-level alignment between visual features and generated text. Extensive experiments on two benchmark chest X-ray datasets, IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR, demonstrate that RIHA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics.
title RIHA: Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment for Radiology Report Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27559