Current evaluation protocols for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in Radiology Report Generation (RRG) rely on report-level metrics that measure lexical overlap or aggregate clinical correctness. However, such metrics do not test whether individual diagnostic statements stem from the actual pathological evidence visible in the image.
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN-ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT's patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training-inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability.
arXiv:2608. 00147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language pretraining learns rich medical image representations from radiology reports, but previous model variants commonly operate within a single shared embedding space, so concept-level structure and interpretability must be recovered post hoc, limiting model transparency and, hence, clinical utility.
By Fabian Drexel, Marlene Fritzsche, Era Stambollxhiu, Miriam Kumpf, Lena Schmitzer, Lea Schumann, Jannik Kahmann, Friedrich Puttkammer, Johannes Moll, Jannik L\"ubberstedt, Zeineb Ben Chaaben, Anirudh Narayanan, Cosmin I. Bercea, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Marcus R. Makowski, Daniel Rueckert, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem
arXiv:2606. 20477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations.
By Yusuf Salcan (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany, CRIION-AI Lab, Freiburg, Germany), Simon Ging (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany, Adaptive & Agentic AI), Robin Schirrmeister (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Philipp Arnold (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Elmar Kotter (Department of Radiology, Medical Center -- University of Freiburg, Germany), Behzad Bozorgtabar (Adaptive & Agentic AI), Thomas Brox (Computer Vision Group, University of Freiburg, Germany)
arXiv:2606. 31099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent years have seen substantial advances in radiology report generation (RRG), yet existing approaches predominantly adopt direct feature fusion when handling multi-view X-ray images.
By Yucheng Chen, Jinjing Zhu, Yang Yu, Yufei Shi, Hane Naghshbandi, Jinhua Liu, Angela S. Koh, Fang Fen, Kian Eng Ong, Si Yong Yeo
arXiv:2606. 02035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical imaging interpretation is a foundational pillar of modern clinical diagnostics, yet the manual generation of radiology reports remains a time-consuming process prone to interpretation inconsistencies.
By Yogesh Kumar Meena, Saurabh Agarwal, K. V. Arya