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arxiv: 2606.22382 · v1 · pith:5Y3SJDFTnew · submitted 2026-06-21 · 📡 eess.IV · cs.AI· cs.CV

Large Language Model-Assisted Cleaning of Report-Derived Labels in a Large-Scale Chest CT Dataset

Pith reviewed 2026-06-26 09:52 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 📡 eess.IV cs.AIcs.CV
keywords large language modelslabel cleaningchest CTradiology reportsdataset qualityCT-RATEabnormality labelslymphadenopathy
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The pith

LLM-assisted review finds that radiologists often agree more with model labels than with original CT-RATE annotations

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper tests whether a large language model can detect mismatches between the labels attached to chest CT scans in the CT-RATE dataset and the text of the corresponding radiology reports. After running GPT-5.4 on 24,434 deduplicated reports that cover 439,812 label instances across 18 abnormality categories, the authors report 96.4 percent overall agreement. In the subset of cases where the two sources disagreed, radiologist review backed the LLM-derived label in 74 percent of general mismatches and 92 percent of lymphadenopathy mismatches. A separate test on 100 manually annotated reports showed that a majority vote across multiple LLMs produced the highest agreement with radiologist reference labels.

Core claim

GPT-5.4-generated binary labels from report text agree with the existing CT-RATE labels at 96.4 percent overall (Cohen's kappa 0.884), with the lowest agreement observed for lymphadenopathy. When discordant instances are presented to radiologists for adjudication, the LLM label is supported in 72 of 97 general cases (74.2 percent) and 91 of 99 lymphadenopathy cases (91.9 percent). Against a radiologist-annotated reference set, multi-LLM majority-vote labels achieve the highest macro-averaged F1 score and kappa of any compared method.

What carries the argument

Generation of structured binary abnormality labels from free-text radiology reports via GPT-5.4, followed by direct comparison to CT-RATE labels and targeted radiologist adjudication of every discordance.

If this is right

  • The cleaned version of the CT-RATE dataset can be released for downstream research use.
  • LLM-assisted cleaning offers a scalable route to improve label quality in other public medical imaging collections.
  • Multi-LLM majority voting outperforms both the original dataset labels and single-LLM outputs when measured against human reference annotations.
  • Lymphadenopathy labels show the largest benefit from this cleaning step and may require targeted attention in future datasets.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same report-to-label comparison pipeline could be applied to other imaging modalities or body regions to surface similar quality issues.
  • Integrating LLM cleaning at the time of dataset construction might reduce the need for later correction.
  • Measuring whether models trained on the cleaned labels show improved detection performance on independent test sets would quantify the practical impact.

Load-bearing premise

The radiologist decisions on the sampled discordances accurately reflect the correct label for the full collection of 439,812 instances.

What would settle it

A larger or complete radiologist review of all discordant label instances to determine whether the observed rates of support for LLM labels remain stable.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2606.22382 by Atsushi Takamatsu, Mototsugu Sato, Osamu Abe, Shouhei Hanaoka, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Tomohiro Kikuchi, Yosuke Yamagishi.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Workflow of the LLM-assisted label-cleaning and validation framework. After report￾level deduplication of CT-RATE, unique radiology reports were processed with GPT-5.4 to generate structured binary labels for 18 abnormality categories. GPT-5.4-derived labels were compared with original CT-RATE labels to quantify agreement and identify discordant instances. Validation included a random report-level referenc… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Radiologist adjudication results in the general discordance review set excluding lymphadenopathy. The figure shows the number of discordant label instances for which radiologist adjudication supported the GPT-5.4-derived label or the original CT-RATE label, stratified by abnormality category. Bar length indicates the number of discordant instances adjudicated in favor of each source. Rows are sorted by the… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Per-label F1 scores and Cohen’s κ against radiologist-annotated reference labels. Heatmap of per-label values for the original CT-RATE labels, individual LLM-derived labels, and multi-LLM majority-vote labels against radiologist-annotated reference labels. Rows indicate abnormality categories sorted in descending order of CT-RATE performance, and columns indicate label sources. Values in each cell indicate… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Purpose: To evaluate whether large language model (LLM)-assisted label cleaning can identify label-report discordance in CT-RATE, a large-scale public chest CT dataset. Materials and Methods: After report-level deduplication, 24,446 unique radiology reports were identified. Twelve reports were excluded from the primary GPT-5.4 analysis because of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry content-safety filtering, leaving 24,434 reports and 439,812 label instances across 18 abnormality categories. GPT-5.4-derived binary labels were generated from report text using structured JSON output and compared with existing CT-RATE labels. Discordant instances were adjudicated by radiologists. In addition, 100 randomly sampled reports were manually annotated to compare CT-RATE labels, individual LLM-derived labels, and multi-LLM majority-vote labels against radiologist-annotated reference labels. Results: Overall agreement between GPT-5.4-derived and CT-RATE labels was 96.4%, with Cohen's kappa of 0.884. Lymphadenopathy showed the lowest agreement and kappa. In discordance review, radiologist adjudication supported GPT-5.4-derived labels in 72 of 97 (74.2%) general discordant instances and 91 of 99 (91.9%) targeted lymphadenopathy discordant instances. Against radiologist-annotated reference labels, multi-LLM majority-vote labels achieved the highest label-macro-averaged F1 score and Cohen's kappa. Conclusion: LLM-assisted label cleaning identified clinically meaningful label-report discordance in CT-RATE and may support scalable quality improvement of public imaging datasets. The cleaned dataset will be made publicly available to support future research.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

3 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript evaluates LLM-assisted label cleaning on the CT-RATE chest CT dataset. After deduplication, GPT-5.4 was used to derive binary labels from 24,434 reports (439,812 label instances across 18 categories), yielding 96.4% agreement (kappa 0.884) with existing CT-RATE labels. Radiologist adjudication of sampled discordants supported the LLM labels in 74.2% of 97 general cases and 91.9% of 99 lymphadenopathy cases. A separate 100-report manual annotation set showed multi-LLM majority vote outperforming single LLM and CT-RATE labels. The authors conclude that the approach identifies clinically meaningful discordance and can support scalable quality improvement, with the cleaned dataset to be released publicly.

Significance. If the sampling of discordants is representative, the work provides empirical evidence that LLM label cleaning can surface actionable errors in a large public chest CT dataset at scale, with the planned public release of cleaned labels offering a concrete resource for the community. The direct comparison to radiologist adjudication and the multi-LLM evaluation are strengths of the empirical design.

major comments (3)
  1. [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods: The selection process for the 97 general and 99 lymphadenopathy discordant instances submitted for radiologist adjudication is not described (e.g., random sampling, stratification by report length or abnormality prevalence, or other criteria). With an implied total discordant pool of approximately 15,833 instances, the reported support rates (74.2% and 91.9%) cannot be assumed to generalize without evidence that the reviewed subset is representative; this directly underpins the central claim of identifying clinically meaningful discordance.
  2. [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods: The 12 reports excluded due to Microsoft Azure AI Foundry content-safety filtering are not characterized (e.g., by report length, abnormality types, or reasons for filtering), and no sensitivity analysis is provided on how their exclusion affects the overall agreement or discordance statistics.
  3. [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods / Results: Prompt engineering details for the GPT-5.4 structured JSON output (including system prompt, few-shot examples, or temperature settings) are not provided, limiting reproducibility of the label derivation step that drives the reported 96.4% agreement and downstream adjudication findings.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Materials and Methods] The 100-report manual annotation set is described as randomly sampled, but no power calculation or justification is given for why this size suffices to benchmark against the much larger discordance adjudication.
  2. Clarify the exact model version referenced as 'GPT-5.4' and whether it corresponds to a publicly available checkpoint.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive comments on our manuscript. We address each major comment point by point below and will make the indicated revisions to improve transparency and reproducibility.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods: The selection process for the 97 general and 99 lymphadenopathy discordant instances submitted for radiologist adjudication is not described (e.g., random sampling, stratification by report length or abnormality prevalence, or other criteria). With an implied total discordant pool of approximately 15,833 instances, the reported support rates (74.2% and 91.9%) cannot be assumed to generalize without evidence that the reviewed subset is representative; this directly underpins the central claim of identifying clinically meaningful discordance.

    Authors: We agree that the sampling process must be explicitly stated. The 97 general and 99 lymphadenopathy discordant instances were obtained via random sampling from the respective discordant pools (total discordants across all categories: 15,833). We will revise the Materials and Methods section to document the random sampling procedure and report the total discordant count to allow readers to assess representativeness. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods: The 12 reports excluded due to Microsoft Azure AI Foundry content-safety filtering are not characterized (e.g., by report length, abnormality types, or reasons for filtering), and no sensitivity analysis is provided on how their exclusion affects the overall agreement or discordance statistics.

    Authors: The 12 excluded reports represent only 0.05% of the deduplicated set. We will add a short characterization of these reports (including report length and primary abnormality categories where available) to the revised Materials and Methods and include a sensitivity analysis confirming that their exclusion has negligible impact on the 96.4% agreement and kappa statistics. revision: yes

  3. Referee: [Materials and Methods] Materials and Methods / Results: Prompt engineering details for the GPT-5.4 structured JSON output (including system prompt, few-shot examples, or temperature settings) are not provided, limiting reproducibility of the label derivation step that drives the reported 96.4% agreement and downstream adjudication findings.

    Authors: We recognize that full prompt details are required for reproducibility. The revised manuscript will include the complete system prompt, any few-shot examples, and the exact model parameters (including temperature) used to generate the structured JSON outputs from GPT-5.4. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

Empirical evaluation study with direct radiologist adjudication; no derivations or fitted parameters

full rationale

The paper describes an empirical workflow: LLM label generation from reports, comparison to existing CT-RATE labels, radiologist adjudication of discordants (97+99 cases), and a separate 100-report manual annotation set for F1/kappa comparison. No equations, parameter fitting, self-citations as load-bearing premises, or renamings of known results appear. All performance claims rest on external human judgments rather than internal consistency or self-definition. The representativeness concern raised by the skeptic is a sampling-validity issue, not circularity.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

No free parameters or new entities introduced; relies on established practices in medical AI and statistics.

axioms (1)
  • standard math Standard inter-rater agreement metrics such as Cohen's kappa are valid for evaluating label concordance
    Invoked in the results when reporting kappa of 0.884

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5875 in / 1238 out tokens · 36913 ms · 2026-06-26T09:52:47.862361+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

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