Recent advances in artificial intelligence for radiology report generation: a brief review

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer significant potential to address the growing bottleneck in radiology caused by an increasing volume of imaging studies amidst a global shortage of radiology professionals. This study presents a comprehensive review of the latest developments in AI, particularly in vision-language models for radiology report generation, providing radiologists with a current reference. We conducted a focused literature search for studies published from 2020 to 2024 and included 14 studies in our review specifically on chest X-ray datasets with limited coverage of 3D modalities, reflecting the early stage of research and ongoing methodological advances in report generation for volumetric imaging. We analysed the model architectures, report generation capabilities, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and performance of these models. Our review highlights the evolution of AI in radiology report generation and underscores the critical need for diverse datasets and standardized evaluation metrics. Despite rapid progress, current AI models are not yet capable of consistently producing high-quality reports and require further improvements in data diversity, model training, and evaluation metrics to achieve a level comparable to human experts.