The Multicultural Medical Assistant: Can LLMs Improve Medical ASR Errors Across Borders?

The global adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare shows promise to enhance clinical workflows and improve patient outcomes. However, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors in critical medical terms remain a significant challenge. These errors can compromise patient care and safety if not detected. This study investigates the prevalence and impact of ASR errors in medical transcription in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. By evaluating raw and LLM-corrected transcriptions of accented English in these regions, we assess the potential and limitations of LLMs to address challenges related to accents and medical terminology in ASR. Our findings highlight significant disparities in ASR accuracy across regions and identify specific conditions under which LLM corrections are most effective.

The Sound of Healthcare: Improving Medical Transcription ASR Accuracy with Large Language Models

In the rapidly evolving landscape of medical documentation, transcribing clinical dialogues accurately is increasingly paramount. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in medical transcription. Utilizing the PriMock57 dataset, which encompasses a diverse range of primary care consultations, we apply advanced LLMs to refine ASR-generated transcripts. Our research is multifaceted, focusing on improvements in general Word Error Rate (WER), Medical Concept WER (MC-WER) for the accurate transcription of essential medical terms, and speaker diarization accuracy. Additionally, we assess the role of LLM post-processing in improving semantic textual similarity, thereby preserving the contextual integrity of clinical dialogues. Through a series of experiments, we compare the efficacy of zero-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting techniques in enhancing diarization and correction accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs, particularly through CoT prompting, not only improve the diarization accuracy of existing ASR systems but also achieve state-of-the-art performance in this domain. This improvement extends to more accurately capturing medical concepts and enhancing the overall semantic coherence of the transcribed dialogues. These findings illustrate the dual role of LLMs in augmenting ASR outputs and independently excelling in transcription tasks, holding significant promise for transforming medical ASR systems and leading to more accurate and reliable patient records in healthcare settings.