Bridging Clinical Narratives and ACR Appropriateness Guidelines: A Multi-Agent RAG System for Medical Imaging Decisions

Abstract

The selection of appropriate medical imaging procedures is a critical and complex clinical decision, guided by extensive evidence-based standards such as the ACR Appropriateness Criteria (ACR-AC). However, the underutilization of these guidelines, stemming from the difficulty of mapping unstructured patient narratives to structured criteria, contributes to suboptimal patient outcomes and increased healthcare costs. To bridge this gap, we introduce a multi-agent cognitive architecture that automates the translation of free-text clinical scenarios into specific, guideline-adherent imaging recommendations. Our system leverages a novel, domain-adapted dense retrieval model, ColBERT, fine-tuned on a synthetically generated dataset of 8,840 clinical scenario-recommendation pairs to achieve highly accurate information retrieval from the ACR-AC knowledge base. This retriever identifies candidate guidelines with a 93.9% top-10 recall, which are then processed by a sequence of LLM-based agents for selection and evidence-based synthesis. We evaluate our architecture using GPT-4.1 and MedGemma agents, demonstrating a state-of-the-art exact match accuracy of 81%, meaning that in 81% of test cases the predicted procedure set was identical to the guideline's reference set, and an F1-score of 0.879. This represents a 67-percentage-point absolute improvement in accuracy over a strong standalone GPT-4.1 baseline, underscoring the contribution that our architecture makes to a frontier model. These results were obtained on a challenging test set with substantial lexical divergence from the source guidelines. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/demo-iclr-B567/