Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization and reasoning abilities, making them well-suited for complex decision-making tasks such as medical consultation (MC). However, existing LLM-based methods often fail to capture the dual nature of MC, which entails two distinct sub-tasks: symptom inquiry, a sequential decision-making process, and disease diagnosis, a classification problem. This mismatch often results in ineffective symptom inquiry and unreliable disease diagnosis. To address this, we propose \textbf{DDO}, a novel LLM-based framework that performs \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{D}ecision \textbf{O}ptimization by decoupling and independently optimizing the the two sub-tasks through a collaborative multi-agent workflow. Experiments on three real-world MC datasets show that DDO consistently outperforms existing LLM-based approaches and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generation-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in the MC task.
Abstract:Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), which integrate external knowledge into LLMs, have shown remarkable performance in various medical domains, including clinical diagnosis. However, existing RAG methods struggle to effectively assess task difficulty to make retrieval decisions, thereby failing to meet the clinical requirements for balancing efficiency and accuracy. So in this paper, we propose FIND (\textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{In}formation \textbf{D}ensity Guided Adaptive RAG), a novel framework that improves the reliability of RAG in disease diagnosis scenarios. FIND incorporates a fine-grained adaptive control module to determine whether retrieval is necessary based on the information density of the input. By optimizing the retrieval process and implementing a knowledge filtering module, FIND ensures that the retrieval is better suited to clinical scenarios. Experiments on three Chinese electronic medical record datasets demonstrate that FIND significantly outperforms various baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness in clinical diagnosis tasks.
Abstract:Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), while integral to modern healthcare, present challenges for clinical reasoning and diagnosis due to their complexity and information redundancy. To address this, we proposed medIKAL (Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs), a framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance diagnostic capabilities. medIKAL assigns weighted importance to entities in medical records based on their type, enabling precise localization of candidate diseases within KGs. It innovatively employs a residual network-like approach, allowing initial diagnosis by the LLM to be merged into KG search results. Through a path-based reranking algorithm and a fill-in-the-blank style prompt template, it further refined the diagnostic process. We validated medIKAL's effectiveness through extensive experiments on a newly introduced open-sourced Chinese EMR dataset, demonstrating its potential to improve clinical diagnosis in real-world settings.