CPR-RAG: Clinical Prior-Regularized Retrieval for Anatomy-Aware 3D CT Report Generation

Sungkyu Yang, Kang-Min Kim, Mansu Kim


Abstract
Generating radiology reports from 3D volumetric data remains challenging due to the difficulty of grounding fine-grained pathologies within high-dimensional scans. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential solution, standard approaches struggle with visual-semantic ambiguity and often introduce irrelevant "normal" context that dilutes pathological signals. To address this limitation, we introduce CPR-RAG, a model-agnostic RAG framework that enhances organ-level grounding by integrating clinical priors into the retrieval process. Specifically, we propose a clinical prior-regularized re-ranking module that leverages corpus-derived co-occurrence statistics to align retrieved candidates with latent disease distributions, ensuring clinical consistency beyond mere visual similarity. Furthermore, we employ clinical relevance context refinement to selectively filter out boilerplate normal descriptions, thereby maximizing the information density of the evidence provided to the generator. Extensive experiments on the RadGenome-ChestCT benchmark demonstrate that CPR-RAG significantly improves clinical efficacy across state-of-the-art radiology report generation models. Human evaluation further confirms that our approach achieves superior factual correctness, completeness, and utility compared to the existing models.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1411
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30572–30587
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1411/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sungkyu Yang, Kang-Min Kim, and Mansu Kim. 2026. CPR-RAG: Clinical Prior-Regularized Retrieval for Anatomy-Aware 3D CT Report Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30572–30587, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CPR-RAG: Clinical Prior-Regularized Retrieval for Anatomy-Aware 3D CT Report Generation (Yang et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1411.pdf
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