BUSTR: Descriptor-Aware Vision-Language Learning for Breast Ultrasound Report Generation

Abstract

Breast ultrasound (BUS) reporting relies on clinically meaningful lesion descriptors, including BI-RADS category, lesion shape, margin, echogenicity, posterior features, pathology, and histology. However, many public BUS datasets provide structured annotations and lesion masks without paired radiologist-written reports, limiting the development of vision--language models for BUS report generation. We propose BUSTR, a descriptor-aware vision--language framework that uses structured lesion information to enable report generation under limited report supervision. BUSTR first constructs descriptor-derived reports from available annotations and radiomics features extracted from lesion masks. It then trains a multi-head Swin Transformer encoder with multitask supervision to learn descriptor-aware visual representations across datasets with partially overlapping annotation sets. The projected visual tokens condition a frozen LLaMA-based language model, and training is guided by a dual-level objective combining token-level cross-entropy with representation-level cosine alignment. At inference, BUSTR generates reports from BUS images without access to structured descriptors, lesion masks, or radiomics features. We evaluate BUSTR on the public BrEaST and BUS-BRA datasets using natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics. BUSTR improves report similarity and descriptor recovery compared with representative report-generation baselines, with notable gains for lesion shape, margin, posterior features, and pathology, as well as improved BI-RADS sensitivity and F1-score on BrEaST. These results suggest that structured BUS descriptors, lesion masks, and radiomics features can provide useful supervision for descriptor-aware BUS report generation when paired radiologist-written reports are unavailable.