Uncovering Knowledge Gaps in Radiology Report Generation Models Through Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly improved the automatic generation of radiology reports. However, existing evaluation methods often focus on report-to-report similarities and fail to reveal the models’ understanding of radiological images and their capacity to achieve human-level granularity in descriptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a system, named ReXKG, which extracts structured information from processed reports to construct a comprehensive radiology knowledge graph. We then propose three metrics to evaluate the similarity of nodes, distribution of edges, and coverage of subgraphs across various knowledge graphs. Using these metrics, we conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of AI-generated and human-written radiology reports, assessing the performance of both specialist and generalist models. Our study provides a deeper understanding of the capabilities and limitations of current AI models in report generation, offering valuable insights for improving model performance and clinical applicability.