Large language models and large concept models in radiology: Present challenges, future directions, and critical perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in radiology artificial intelligence (AI), offering significant capabilities in areas such as image report generation, clinical decision support, and workflow optimization. The first part of this manuscript presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of LLM applications in radiology, including their historical evolution, technical foundations, and practical uses. Despite notable advances, inherent architectural constraints, such as token-level sequential processing, limit their ability to perform deep abstract reasoning and holistic contextual understanding, which are critical for fine-grained diagnostic interpretation. We provide a critical perspective on current LLMs and discuss key challenges, including model reliability, bias, and explainability, highlighting the pressing need for novel approaches to advance radiology AI. Large concept models (LCMs) represent a nascent and promising paradigm in radiology AI, designed to transcend the limitations of token-level processing by utilizing higher-order conceptual representations and multimodal data integration. The second part of this manuscript introduces the foundational principles and theoretical framework of LCMs, highlighting their potential to facilitate enhanced semantic reasoning, long-range context synthesis, and improved clinical decision-making. Critically, the core of this section is the proposal of a novel theoretical framework for LCMs, formalized and extended from our group's foundational concept-based models - the world's earliest articulation of this paradigm for medical AI. This conceptual shift has since been externally validated and propelled by the recent publication of the LCM architectural proposal by Meta AI, providing a large-scale engineering blueprint for the future development of this technology. We also outline future research directions and the transformative implications of this emerging AI paradigm for radiologic practice, aiming to provide a blueprint for advancing toward human-like conceptual understanding in AI. While challenges persist, we are at the very beginning of a new era, and it is not unreasonable to hope that future advancements will overcome these hurdles, pushing the boundaries of AI in Radiology, far beyond even the most state-of-the-art models of today.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".