Pathological examination of the placenta is an effective method for detecting and mitigating health risks associated with childbirth. Recent advancements in AI have enabled the use of photographs of the placenta and pathology reports for detecting and classifying signs of childbirth-related pathologies. However, existing automated methods are computationally extensive, which limits their deployability. We propose two modifications to vision-language contrastive learning (VLC) frameworks to enhance their accuracy and efficiency: (1) text-anchored vision-language contrastive knowledge distillation (VLCD)-a new knowledge distillation strategy for medical VLC pretraining, and (2) unsupervised predistillation using a large natural images dataset for improved initialization. Our approach distills efficient neural networks that match or surpass the teacher model in performance while achieving model compression and acceleration. Our results showcase the value of unsupervised predistillation in improving the performance and robustness of our approach, specifically for lower-quality images. VLCD serves as an effective way to improve the efficiency and deployability of medical VLC approaches, making AI-based healthcare solutions more accessible, especially in resource-constrained environments.

We explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist and potentially correct physicians in medical decision-making tasks. We evaluate several LLMs, including Meditron, Llama2, and Mistral, to analyze the ability of these models to interact effectively with physicians across different scenarios. We consider questions from PubMedQA and several tasks, ranging from binary (yes/no) responses to long answer generation, where the answer of the model is produced after an interaction with a physician. Our findings suggest that prompt design significantly influences the downstream accuracy of LLMs and that LLMs can provide valuable feedback to physicians, challenging incorrect diagnoses and contributing to more accurate decision-making. For example, when the physician is accurate 38% of the time, Mistral can produce the correct answer, improving accuracy up to 74% depending on the prompt being used, while Llama2 and Meditron models exhibit greater sensitivity to prompt choice. Our analysis also uncovers the challenges of ensuring that LLM-generated suggestions are pertinent and useful, emphasizing the need for further research in this area.

Large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-4 have become the dominant technology in modern natural language processing (Liu et al., 2023; Zhao et al., 2023). Trained on large corpora to predict the next token and refined with human feedback (Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022; Ziegler et al., 2020), these models develop impressive capabilities in areas such as summarization and questionanswering (Zhang et al., 2023; Goyal et al., 2023; Karpukhin et al., 2020). While the focus has been on these models' performance when responding to general English prompts, it is clear there is potential for specialist models to impact biomedical research and healthcare (Arora and Arora, 2023; Shah et al., 2023; Thirunavukarasu et al., 2023). Such applications include information retrieval and summarization from the ever-expanding biomedical literature (Wang et al., 2021; Yang, 2020), clinical information such as physician notes in electronic health records, and radiology reports (Murray et al., 2021; Feblowitz et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2018). Improving domain-specific language models will help accelerate biomedical discovery, drive down healthcare costs, and improve patient care. Large, general models like GPT-4 and Med-PaLM 2 have set new standards for performance on question-answering and information extraction (Kung et al., 2022; Singhal et al., 2023a,b), but there are several drawbacks to these models. They are costly to train and utilize. Compute for training and inference of large language models have increased 10-to 100-fold since 2015 (Sevilla et al., 2022), translating to extremely high financial and