medical terminology
Searching for Best Practices in Medical Transcription with Large Language Model
The transcription of medical monologues, especially those containing a high density of specialized terminology and delivered with a distinct accent, presents a significant challenge for existing automated systems. This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate highly accurate medical transcripts from audio recordings of doctors' monologues, specifically focusing on Indian accents. Our methodology integrates advanced language modeling techniques to lower the Word Error Rate (WER) and ensure the precise recognition of critical medical terms. Through rigorous testing on a comprehensive dataset of medical recordings, our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in both overall transcription accuracy and the fidelity of key medical terminologies. These results suggest that our proposed system could significantly aid in clinical documentation processes, offering a reliable tool for healthcare providers to streamline their transcription needs while maintaining high standards of accuracy.
LLMs-in-the-loop Part-1: Expert Small AI Models for Bio-Medical Text Translation
Keles, Bunyamin, Gunay, Murat, Caglar, Serdar I.
Machine translation is indispensable in healthcare for enabling the global dissemination of medical knowledge across languages. However, complex medical terminology poses unique challenges to achieving adequate translation quality and accuracy. This study introduces a novel "LLMs-in-the-loop" approach to develop supervised neural machine translation models optimized specifically for medical texts. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities, this research shows that small, specialized models trained on high-quality in-domain (mostly synthetic) data can outperform even vastly larger LLMs. Custom parallel corpora in six languages were compiled from scientific articles, synthetically generated clinical documents, and medical texts. Our LLMs-in-the-loop methodology employs synthetic data generation, rigorous evaluation, and agent orchestration to enhance performance. We developed small medical translation models using the MarianMT base model. We introduce a new medical translation test dataset to standardize evaluation in this domain. Assessed using BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, and BERT scores on this test set, our MarianMT-based models outperform Google Translate, DeepL, and GPT-4-Turbo. Results demonstrate that our LLMs-in-the-loop approach, combined with fine-tuning high-quality, domain-specific data, enables specialized models to outperform general-purpose and some larger systems. This research, part of a broader series on expert small models, paves the way for future healthcare-related AI developments, including deidentification and bio-medical entity extraction models. Our study underscores the potential of tailored neural translation models and the LLMs-in-the-loop methodology to advance the field through improved data generation, evaluation, agent, and modeling techniques.
KG-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models for Medical QA with Knowledge Graphs and Ranking Techniques
Yang, Rui, Liu, Haoran, Marrese-Taylor, Edison, Zeng, Qingcheng, Ke, Yu He, Li, Wanxin, Cheng, Lechao, Chen, Qingyu, Caverlee, James, Matsuo, Yutaka, Li, Irene
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities with the potential to innovate in medicine. However, the application of LLMs in real clinical settings remains challenging due to the lack of factual consistency in the generated content. In this work, we develop an augmented LLM framework, KG-Rank, which leverages a medical knowledge graph (KG) along with ranking and re-ranking techniques, to improve the factuality of long-form question answering (QA) in the medical domain. Specifically, when receiving a question, KG-Rank automatically identifies medical entities within the question and retrieves the related triples from the medical KG to gather factual information. Subsequently, KG-Rank innovatively applies multiple ranking techniques to refine the ordering of these triples, providing more relevant and precise information for LLM inference. To the best of our knowledge, KG-Rank is the first application of KG combined with ranking models in medical QA specifically for generating long answers. Evaluation on four selected medical QA datasets demonstrates that KG-Rank achieves an improvement of over 18% in ROUGE-L score. Additionally, we extend KG-Rank to open domains, including law, business, music, and history, where it realizes a 14% improvement in ROUGE-L score, indicating the effectiveness and great potential of KG-Rank.
Korean Bio-Medical Corpus (KBMC) for Medical Named Entity Recognition
Byun, Sungjoo, Hong, Jiseung, Park, Sumin, Jang, Dongjun, Seo, Jean, Kim, Minseok, Oh, Chaeyoung, Shin, Hyopil
Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in medical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Yet, there has not been an open-source medical NER dataset specifically for the Korean language. To address this, we utilized ChatGPT to assist in constructing the KBMC (Korean Bio-Medical Corpus), which we are now presenting to the public. With the KBMC dataset, we noticed an impressive 20% increase in medical NER performance compared to models trained on general Korean NER datasets. This research underscores the significant benefits and importance of using specialized tools and datasets, like ChatGPT, to enhance language processing in specialized fields such as healthcare.
Integrating UMLS Knowledge into Large Language Models for Medical Question Answering
Yang, Rui, Marrese-Taylor, Edison, Ke, Yuhe, Cheng, Lechao, Chen, Qingyu, Li, Irene
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful text generation capabilities, bringing unprecedented innovation to the healthcare field. While LLMs hold immense promise for applications in healthcare, applying them to real clinical scenarios presents significant challenges, as these models may generate content that deviates from established medical facts and even exhibit potential biases. In our research, we develop an augmented LLM framework based on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), aiming to better serve the healthcare community. We employ LLaMa2-13b-chat and ChatGPT-3.5 as our benchmark models, and conduct automatic evaluations using the ROUGE Score and BERTScore on 104 questions from the LiveQA test set. Additionally, we establish criteria for physician-evaluation based on four dimensions: Factuality, Completeness, Readability and Relevancy. ChatGPT-3.5 is used for physician evaluation with 20 questions on the LiveQA test set. Multiple resident physicians conducted blind reviews to evaluate the generated content, and the results indicate that this framework effectively enhances the factuality, completeness, and relevance of generated content. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of using UMLS-augmented LLMs and highlights the potential application value of LLMs in in medical question-answering.
Terminology-aware Medical Dialogue Generation
Tang, Chen, Zhang, Hongbo, Loakman, Tyler, Lin, Chenghua, Guerin, Frank
Medical dialogue generation aims to generate responses according to a history of dialogue turns between doctors and patients. Unlike open-domain dialogue generation, this requires background knowledge specific to the medical domain. Existing generative frameworks for medical dialogue generation fall short of incorporating domain-specific knowledge, especially with regard to medical terminology. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve medical dialogue generation by considering features centered on domain-specific terminology. We leverage an attention mechanism to incorporate terminologically centred features, and fill in the semantic gap between medical background knowledge and common utterances by enforcing language models to learn terminology representations with an auxiliary terminology recognition task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, in which our proposed framework outperforms SOTA language models. Additionally, we provide a new dataset with medical terminology annotations to support the research on medical dialogue generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tangg555/meddialog.
LegalRelectra: Mixed-domain Language Modeling for Long-range Legal Text Comprehension
Hua, Wenyue, Zhang, Yuchen, Chen, Zhe, Li, Josie, Weber, Melanie
The application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to specialized domains, such as the law, has recently received a surge of interest. As many legal services rely on processing and analyzing large collections of documents, automating such tasks with NLP tools emerges as a key challenge. Many popular language models, such as BERT or RoBERTa, are general-purpose models, which have limitations on processing specialized legal terminology and syntax. In addition, legal documents may contain specialized vocabulary from other domains, such as medical terminology in personal injury text. Here, we propose LegalRelectra, a legal-domain language model that is trained on mixed-domain legal and medical corpora. We show that our model improves over general-domain and single-domain medical and legal language models when processing mixed-domain (personal injury) text. Our training architecture implements the Electra framework, but utilizes Reformer instead of BERT for its generator and discriminator. We show that this improves the model's performance on processing long passages and results in better long-range text comprehension.
Council Post: AI May Cure The Ills In Healthcare Tech
Ashish Kachru is President and General Manager of the GuidingCare division of HealthEdge Software. As our healthcare system struggles toward a model in which consumers are at the center of the equation, technology is playing a rapidly increasing role in smoothing their way through the ecosystem. Consumers are demanding a better healthcare experience, but there's a massive collision coming between the exabytes of global health data and consumer health and insurance illiteracy. "Interoperability" describes a set of American regulatory initiatives that are in play right now and will drive change in the industry for years to come. As president of a healthcare technology company, I believe them to be as significant as any changes to the system made in this century, including the introduction of HIPAA privacy regulations and the Affordable Care Act.