LLaMA-XR: A Novel Framework for Radiology Report Generation Using LLaMA and QLoRA Fine Tuning

Background: The goal of automated radiology report generation is to help radiologists in their task of creating descriptive reports from chest radiographs. However, the process of creating coherent and contextually accurate reports has been challenging, mainly due to the intricacies of medical language and the need to correlate visual data with textual descriptions. Methods: This study presents LLaMA-XR, a novel framework that integrates Meta LLaMA 3.1 Large Language Model with DenseNet-121-based image embeddings and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning. Results: The experiment conducted on the IU X-ray dataset demonstrates that LLaMA-XR outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods. It achieves an ROUGE-L score of 0.433 and a METEOR score of 0.336, establishing new performance benchmarks in the domain. Conclusions: These results underscore LLaMA-XR's potential as an effective artificial intelligence system for automated radiology reporting, offering enhanced performance.