Bridging the Skill Gap in Clinical CBCT Interpretation with CBCTRepD

TL;DR

This paper introduces CBCTRepD, a system that leverages a large, high-quality dataset and a multi-level evaluation framework to enhance AI-assisted CBCT report generation, improving accuracy and collaboration in clinical settings.

Contribution

The paper presents CBCTRepD, a novel bilingual report-generation system with a large dataset and evaluation framework, advancing AI integration in oral and maxillofacial CBCT reporting.

Findings

CBCTRepD outperforms existing methods in report quality.

It improves radiologist performance across experience levels.

It reduces clinically significant omissions and errors.

Abstract

Generative AI has advanced rapidly in medical report generation; however, its application to oral and maxillofacial CBCT reporting remains limited, largely because of the scarcity of high-quality paired CBCT-report data and the intrinsic complexity of volumetric CBCT interpretation. To address this, we introduce CBCTRepD, a bilingual oral and maxillofacial CBCT report-generation system designed for integration into routine radiologist-AI co-authoring workflows. We curated a large-scale, high-quality paired CBCT-report dataset comprising approximately 7,408 studies, covering 55 oral disease entities across diverse acquisition settings, and used it to develop the system. We further established a clinically grounded, multi-level evaluation framework that assesses both direct AI-generated drafts and radiologist-edited collaboration reports using automatic metrics together with radiologist- and clinician-centered evaluation. Using this framework, we show that CBCTRepD achieves superior report-generation performance and produces drafts with writing quality and standardization comparable to those of intermediate radiologists. More importantly, in radiologist-AI collaboration, CBCTRepD provides consistent and clinically meaningful benefits across experience levels: it helps novice radiologists improve toward intermediate-level reporting, enables intermediate radiologists to approach senior-level performance, and even assists senior radiologists by reducing omission-related errors, including clinically important missed lesions. By improving report structure, reducing omissions, and promoting attention to co-existing lesions across anatomical regions, CBCTRepD shows strong and reliable potential as a practical assistant for real-world CBCT reporting across multi-level care settings.