Improving Health Literacy through Lay Summarization of Radiological Reports: An Evaluation of BioNER and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

2026-09-02

AI Summary

研究通过结合生物命名实体识别（NER）和检索增强生成（RAG）的方法，提高放射学报告对患者的可读性和准确性，解决患者难以理解专业术语的问题。

Abstract

Radiology reports are written primarily for clinicians, and their specialized terminology often makes them difficult for patients to interpret. As a result, many patients turn to publicly available Large Language Models (LLMs) to help explain their reports, despite well-documented risks of factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. Automated lay-summary generation has emerged as a promising alternative, yet the effectiveness of retrieval-enhanced and clinically informed approaches for radiology-specific communication remains underexplored. This study investigates the extent to which Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) improve the quality, factual consistency, and readability of automatically generated lay summaries compared with standard LLM-based generation. We develop a framework combining NER-based extraction of clinically relevant findings with a RAG mechanism for contextual grounding, evaluated across few-shot and fine-tuned variants of two models (Qwen, BioBART). Results show that NER consistently improves readability and overall quality, while RAG alone offers no benefit and can introduce hallucinations from irrelevant retrieved terms. Combining RAG with NER degrades performance in few-shot settings but improves readability when fine-tuned. Fine-tuned BioBART with NER achieves the best overall performance, highlighting entity-aware extraction as the primary driver of improved patient-friendly summaries.

Problem

• Radiology Reports
• Health Literacy
• Large Language Models
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Named Entity Recognition

Innovation

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Named Entity Recognition (NER)
• Radiology Reports
• Automated Lay-Summary Generation
• Entity-Aware Extraction