Open-Source Large Language Models in Radiology: A Review and Tutorial for Practical Research and Clinical Deployment

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into health care holds substantial potential to enhance clinical workflows and care delivery. However, LLMs also pose serious risks if integration is not thoughtfully executed, with complex challenges spanning accuracy, accessibility, privacy, and regulation. Proprietary commercial LLMs (eg, GPT-4 [OpenAI], Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus [Anthropic], Gemini [Google]) have received much attention from researchers in the medical domain, including radiology. Interestingly, open-source LLMs (eg, Llama 3 and LLaVA-Med) have received comparatively little attention. Yet, open-source LLMs hold several key advantages over proprietary LLMs for medical institutions, hospitals, and individual researchers. The wider adoption of open-source LLMs has been slower, perhaps in part due to the lack of familiarity, accessible computational infrastructure, and community-built tools to streamline their local implementation and customize them for specific use cases. Thus, this article provides a tutorial for the implementation of open-source LLMs in radiology, including examples of commonly used tools for text generation and techniques for troubleshooting issues with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning. Implementation-ready code for each tool is provided at https://github.com/UM2ii/Open-Source-LLM-Tools-for-Radiology. In addition, this article compares the benefits and drawbacks of open-source and proprietary LLMs, discusses the differentiating characteristics of popular open-source LLMs, and highlights recent advancements that may affect their adoption.