Reporting Practice Matters: The Impact of Reference Choice on Chest X-ray Report Evaluation
Study shows radiology reporting-style variations in reference reports can flip rankings of chest X-ray report generation models; releases MIMIC-CXR-Ext-ReRef dataset.
The paper quantifies how variations in radiologists' reporting practices distort evaluation of radiology report generation (RRG) models, introducing a radiologist-informed taxonomy and the ReRef method for rewriting reference reports while preserving clinical meaning. On MIMIC-CXR with RadCliQ-v1, condensing normal-findings discussion caused Libra to drop from first to second while CheXOne rose from third to first among nine models. The authors release MIMIC-CXR-Ext-ReRef, a radiologist-validated dataset of 120 original/alternative reference pairs, arguing metrics conflate clinical correctness with stylistic conformity.