BTReport: A Framework for Brain Tumor Radiology Report Generation with Clinically Relevant Features

TL;DR

BTReport introduces an interpretable brain tumor radiology report generation framework using deterministic imaging features, improving clinical relevance and report accuracy while providing a new dataset for neuro-oncology research.

Contribution

It presents a novel deterministic feature extraction approach for brain tumor report generation and introduces a new dataset, BTReport-BraTS, for neuro-oncology applications.

Findings

Generated reports are more aligned with clinical references.

Extracted features predict key clinical outcomes.

Reports are less prone to hallucinations.

Abstract

Recent advances in radiology report generation (RRG) have been driven by large paired image-text datasets; however, progress in neuro-oncology has been limited due to a lack of open paired image-report datasets. Here, we introduce BTReport, an open-source framework for brain tumor RRG that constructs natural language radiology reports using deterministically extracted imaging features. Unlike existing approaches that rely on large general-purpose or fine-tuned vision-language models for both image interpretation and report composition, BTReport performs deterministic feature extraction for image analysis and uses large language models only for syntactic structuring and narrative formatting. By separating RRG into a deterministic feature extraction step and a report generation step, the generated reports are completely interpretable and less prone to hallucinations. We show that the features used for report generation are predictive of key clinical outcomes, including survival and IDH mutation status, and reports generated by BTReport are more closely aligned with reference clinical reports than existing baselines for RRG. Finally, we introduce BTReport-BraTS, a companion dataset that augments BraTS imaging with synthetically generated radiology reports produced with BTReport. Code for this project can be found at https://github.com/KurtLabUW/BTReport.