Concept-Grounded Reasoning with Prompt-Driven Localization for Interpretable Structured Report Generation

Summary

Medical imaging modalities such as ultrasound and X-ray are widely used in clinical practice, where diagnosis follows a structured, evidence-driven workflow aligned with standardized criteria. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise for automated medical report generation, most existing systems rely on end-to-end multimodal fusion without modeling clinically defined intermediate attributes, leading to limited grounding and interpretability. To address this issue, we propose CORAL (COncept-grounded ReAsoning with Localization), a multimodal framework that integrates spatial grounding and concept-level supervision into a unified reasoning process. CORAL employs a prompt-driven medical segmentation model to localize lesions and predicts multi-class clinical attributes through a Concept Bottleneck module. The resulting textual concept tokens are combined with mask-modulated visual features within an MLLM to enable structured report generation and diagnostic prediction. Experiments on BUS-CoT and IU X-ray datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in diagnostic accuracy, concept consistency, and report quality over strong general-purpose and medical MLLMs, indicating that concept-grounded reasoning better aligns generation with clinical decision processes.