Interleaving anatomical inspection and diagnostic reasoning for explainable radiology report generation

Chentao Huang, Runlong Lin, Zhijun Wang, Yunxiang Li, Yuanyuan Sun +3

Automated radiology report generation can draft clinically plausible reports, yet the pathway from visual evidence to reported findings remains opaque, leaving the diagnostic basis of these reports unexplained and the generated reports difficult to review or revise. We introduce ARIVE (Anatomy-guided Reasoning with Interleaved Visual Evidence), an explainable report generation framework that interleaves anatomical inspection with diagnostic reasoning prior to final report composition. To support this process, we constructed 159,416 multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) trajectories from MIMIC-CXR, wherein visual evidence from inspected anatomical regions informs subsequent clinical interpretation. Trained on these trajectories and further optimized using anatomical and clinical-content rewards, ARIVE achieved superior clinical-efficacy performance compared with strong baselines on MIMIC-CXR and the abnormality-centered MIMIC-ABN. ARIVE's reports were competitive with those of leading models in blinded expert grading, and its MCoT trajectories earned high ratings for diagnostic traceability. Furthermore, a paired review evaluation suggests that access to MCoT can aid in identifying…