GraphRAG-Rad: Concept-Aware Radiology Report Generation via Latent Visual-Semantic Retrieval

AbstractRadiology report generation involves translating visual signals from pixels into precise clinical language. Existing encoder-decoder models often suffer from hallucinations, generating plausible but incorrect medical findings. We propose GraphRAG-Rad, a novel architecture that integrates biomedical knowledge through a novel Latent Visual-Semantic Retrieval (VSR). Unlike traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods that rely on textual queries, our approach aligns visual embeddings with the latent space of the Knowledge Graph, PrimeKG. The retrieved sub-graph guides the Visual Encoder and the Multi-Hop Reasoning Module. The reasoning module simulates clinical deduction paths (Ground-Glass Opacity → Viral Pneumonia → COVID-19) before it combines the information with visual features in a Graph-Gated Cross-Modal Decoder. Experiments on the COV-CTR dataset demonstrate that GraphRAG-Rad achieves competitive performance with strong results across multiple metrics. Furthermore, ablation studies show that integrating latent retrieval and reasoning improves performance significantly compared to a visual-only baseline. Qualitative analysis further reveals interpretable attention maps. These maps explicitly link visual regions to symbolic medical concepts, effectively bridging the modality gap between vision and language.