arXiv:2507.11457cs.LGeess.IV2025-07

用大模型分两步排序淋巴结,提升直肠癌转移评估的准确性和可解释性。

LRMR: LLM-Driven Relational Multi-node Ranking for Lymph Node Metastasis Assessment in Rectal Cancer

  • 先生成淋巴结特征报告,再通过对比推理排序风险等级。
  • 在117例患者上达AUC 0.7917,优于传统深度学习模型。
  • 结果可解释,适合临床医生辅助决策,也适合研究者参考。

直肠癌术前淋巴结(LN)转移评估对治疗决策至关重要,但传统基于形态学的MRI评估诊断性能有限。现有人工智能模型多为黑箱,且通常孤立评估节点,忽略患者整体背景。为此,我们提出LRMR——一种基于大语言模型的关联多节点排序框架。该方法将诊断任务重构为结构化推理与排序过程:第一阶段,多模态大语言模型分析患者所有淋巴结的合成图像,生成包含十项影像学特征的结构化报告;第二阶段,文本型大语言模型对不同患者的报告进行成对比较,依据异常特征的数量和严重程度建立相对风险排序。在117例回顾性队列中,LRMR达到AUC 0.7917和F1-score 0.7200,优于ResNet50(AUC 0.7708)。消融实验表明,移除关系排序或结构化提示阶段,AUC分别降至0.6875和0.6458,验证了两项核心设计的价值。本研究证明,通过双阶段大模型框架解耦视觉感知与认知推理,为直肠癌淋巴结转移评估提供了可解释、高效的新范式。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurate preoperative assessment of lymph node (LN) metastasis in rectal cancer guides treatment decisions, yet conventional MRI evaluation based on morphological criteria shows limited diagnostic performance. While some artificial intelligence models have been developed, they often operate as black boxes, lacking the interpretability needed for clinical trust. Moreover, these models typically evaluate nodes in isolation, overlooking the patient-level context. To address these limitations, we introduce LRMR, an LLM-Driven Relational Multi-node Ranking framework. This approach reframes the diagnostic task from a direct classification problem into a structured reasoning and ranking process. The LRMR framework operates in two stages. First, a multimodal large language model (LLM) analyzes a composite montage image of all LNs from a patient, generating a structured report that details ten distinct radiological features. Second, a text-based LLM performs pairwise comparisons of these reports between different patients, establishing a relative risk ranking based on the severity and number of adverse features. We evaluated our method on a retrospective cohort of 117 rectal cancer patients. LRMR achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7917 and an F1-score of 0.7200, outperforming a range of deep learning baselines, including ResNet50 (AUC 0.7708). Ablation studies confirmed the value of our two main contributions: removing the relational ranking stage or the structured prompting stage led to a significant performance drop, with AUCs falling to 0.6875 and 0.6458, respectively. Our work demonstrates that decoupling visual perception from cognitive reasoning through a two-stage LLM framework offers a powerful, interpretable, and effective new paradigm for assessing lymph node metastasis in rectal cancer.

医学影像大模型淋巴结可解释性

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