Evaluating the Feasibility of Using Smaller Large Language Models for Generating Impressions from Findings in Radiology Reports
摘要
Large Language Models hold the potential to revolutionise the field of radiology by automating radiology tasks and enhancing clinical decision-making. However, the substantial computational resources required for training LLMs with a large number of parameters create barriers to their use both in radiology-related research and potential clinical applications. This study evaluated the performance of two smaller large language models (Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct) in comparison to a newly introduced state-of-the-art multimodal model, LLaMA 4 Scout, for the task of impression generation in radiology. Experiments were conducted with and without in-context learning to ascertain its impact on model performance. Results show that in-context learning considerably improves the performance of all models, allowing them to achieve competitive results in the task of impression generation. These findings underscore the capabilities of small open-source LLMs and highlight the potential of advanced multimodal models for radiology-specific NLP tasks.