Privacy policies serve as the primary conduit through which online service providers inform users about their data collection and usage procedures. However, in a bid to be comprehensive and mitigate legal risks, these policy documents are often quite verbose. In practical use, users tend to click the Agree button directly rather than reading them carefully. This practice exposes users to risks of privacy leakage and legal issues. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 has opened new possibilities for text analysis, especially for lengthy documents like privacy policies. In this study, we investigate a privacy policy text analysis framework PolicyGPT based on the LLM. This framework was tested using two datasets. The first dataset comprises of privacy policies from 115 websites, which were meticulously annotated by legal experts, categorizing each segment into one of 10 classes. The second dataset consists of privacy policies from 304 popular mobile applications, with each sentence manually annotated and classified into one of another 10 categories. Under zero-shot learning conditions, PolicyGPT demonstrated robust performance. For the first dataset, it achieved an accuracy rate of 97%, while for the second dataset, it attained an 87% accuracy rate, surpassing that of the baseline machine learning and neural network models.
This paper presents RadOnc-GPT, a large language model specialized for radiation oncology through advanced tuning methods. RadOnc-GPT was finetuned on a large dataset of radiation oncology patient records and clinical notes from the Mayo Clinic. The model employs instruction tuning on three key tasks - generating radiotherapy treatment regimens, determining optimal radiation modalities, and providing diagnostic descriptions/ICD codes based on patient diagnostic details. Evaluations conducted by having radiation oncologists compare RadOnc-GPT impressions to general large language model impressions showed that RadOnc-GPT generated outputs with significantly improved clarity, specificity, and clinical relevance. The study demonstrated the potential of using large language models fine-tuned using domain-specific knowledge like RadOnc-GPT to achieve transformational capabilities in highly specialized healthcare fields such as radiation oncology.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model for general image segmentation, has demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across numerous natural image segmentation tasks. However, SAM's performance significantly declines when applied to medical images, primarily due to the substantial disparity between natural and medical image domains. To effectively adapt SAM to medical images, it is important to incorporate critical third-dimensional information, i.e., volumetric or temporal knowledge, during fine-tuning. Simultaneously, we aim to harness SAM's pre-trained weights within its original 2D backbone to the fullest extent. In this paper, we introduce a modality-agnostic SAM adaptation framework, named as MA-SAM, that is applicable to various volumetric and video medical data. Our method roots in the parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to update only a small portion of weight increments while preserving the majority of SAM's pre-trained weights. By injecting a series of 3D adapters into the transformer blocks of the image encoder, our method enables the pre-trained 2D backbone to extract third-dimensional information from input data. The effectiveness of our method has been comprehensively evaluated on four medical image segmentation tasks, by using 10 public datasets across CT, MRI, and surgical video data. Remarkably, without using any prompt, our method consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art 3D approaches, surpassing nnU-Net by 0.9%, 2.6%, and 9.9% in Dice for CT multi-organ segmentation, MRI prostate segmentation, and surgical scene segmentation respectively. Our model also demonstrates strong generalization, and excels in challenging tumor segmentation when prompts are used. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cchen-cc/MA-SAM.
This paper introduces Radiology-Llama2, a large language model specialized for radiology through a process known as instruction tuning. Radiology-Llama2 is based on the Llama2 architecture and further trained on a large dataset of radiology reports to generate coherent and clinically useful impressions from radiological findings. Quantitative evaluations using ROUGE metrics on the MIMIC-CXR and OpenI datasets demonstrate that Radiology-Llama2 achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other generative language models, with a Rouge-1 score of 0.4834 on MIMIC-CXR and 0.4185 on OpenI. Additional assessments by radiology experts highlight the model's strengths in understandability, coherence, relevance, conciseness, and clinical utility. The work illustrates the potential of localized language models designed and tuned for specialized domains like radiology. When properly evaluated and deployed, such models can transform fields like radiology by automating rote tasks and enhancing human expertise.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has marked a pivotal shift in the field of natural language processing (NLP). LLMs have revolutionized a multitude of domains, and they have made a significant impact in the medical field. Large language models are now more abundant than ever, and many of these models exhibit bilingual capabilities, proficient in both English and Chinese. However, a comprehensive evaluation of these models remains to be conducted. This lack of assessment is especially apparent within the context of radiology NLP. This study seeks to bridge this gap by critically evaluating thirty two LLMs in interpreting radiology reports, a crucial component of radiology NLP. Specifically, the ability to derive impressions from radiologic findings is assessed. The outcomes of this evaluation provide key insights into the performance, strengths, and weaknesses of these LLMs, informing their practical applications within the medical domain.
Participant recruitment based on unstructured medical texts such as clinical notes and radiology reports has been a challenging yet important task for the cohort establishment in clinical research. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have achieved tremendous success in various downstream tasks thanks to their promising performance in language understanding, inference, and generation. It is then natural to test their feasibility in solving the cohort recruitment task, which involves the classification of a given paragraph of medical text into disease label(s). However, when applied to knowledge-intensive problem settings such as medical text classification, where the LLMs are expected to understand the decision made by human experts and accurately identify the implied disease labels, the LLMs show a mediocre performance. A possible explanation is that, by only using the medical text, the LLMs neglect to use the rich context of additional information that languages afford. To this end, we propose to use a knowledge graph as auxiliary information to guide the LLMs in making predictions. Moreover, to further boost the LLMs adapt to the problem setting, we apply a chain-of-thought (CoT) sample selection strategy enhanced by reinforcement learning, which selects a set of CoT samples given each individual medical report. Experimental results and various ablation studies show that our few-shot learning method achieves satisfactory performance compared with fine-tuning strategies and gains superb advantages when the available data is limited. The code and sample dataset of the proposed CohortGPT model is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CohortGPT-4872/
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common form of dementia that severely impacts patient health. As AD impairs the patient's language understanding and expression ability, the speech of AD patients can serve as an indicator of this disease. This study investigates various methods for detecting AD using patients' speech and transcripts data from the DementiaBank Pitt database. The proposed approach involves pre-trained language models and Graph Neural Network (GNN) that constructs a graph from the speech transcript, and extracts features using GNN for AD detection. Data augmentation techniques, including synonym replacement, GPT-based augmenter, and so on, were used to address the small dataset size. Audio data was also introduced, and WavLM model was used to extract audio features. These features were then fused with text features using various methods. Finally, a contrastive learning approach was attempted by converting speech transcripts back to audio and using it for contrastive learning with the original audio. We conducted intensive experiments and analysis on the above methods. Our findings shed light on the challenges and potential solutions in AD detection using speech and audio data.
In this study, we evaluate the performance of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in clinical radiotherapy. Our results indicate that SAM's 'segment anything' mode can achieve clinically acceptable segmentation results in most organs-at-risk (OARs) with Dice scores higher than 0.7. SAM's 'box prompt' mode further improves the Dice scores by 0.1 to 0.5. Considering the size of the organ and the clarity of its boundary, SAM displays better performance for large organs with clear boundaries but performs worse for smaller organs with unclear boundaries. Given that SAM, a model pre-trained purely on natural images, can handle the delineation of OARs from medical images with clinically acceptable accuracy, these results highlight SAM's robust generalization capabilities with consistent accuracy in automatic segmentation for radiotherapy. In other words, SAM can achieve delineation of different OARs at different sites using a generic automatic segmentation model. SAM's generalization capabilities across different disease sites suggest that it is technically feasible to develop a generic model for automatic segmentation in radiotherapy.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is beginning with amyloidosis, followed by neuronal loss and deterioration in structure, function, and cognition. The accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain, measured through 18F-florbetapir (AV45) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, has been widely used for early diagnosis of AD. However, the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology remains unclear, and causal inference approaches are needed to uncover how amyloid-beta levels can impact AD development. In this paper, we propose a graph varying coefficient neural network (GVCNet) for estimating the individual treatment effect with continuous treatment levels using a graph convolutional neural network. We highlight the potential of causal inference approaches, including GVCNet, for measuring the regional causal connections between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology, which may serve as a robust tool for early diagnosis and tailored care.
This paper introduces SAMAug, a novel visual point augmentation method for the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that enhances interactive image segmentation performance. SAMAug generates augmented point prompts to provide more information to SAM. From the initial point prompt, SAM produces the initial mask, which is then fed into our proposed SAMAug to generate augmented point prompts. By incorporating these extra points, SAM can generate augmented segmentation masks based on the augmented point prompts and the initial prompt, resulting in improved segmentation performance. We evaluate four point augmentation techniques: random selection, maximum difference entropy, maximum distance, and a saliency model. Experiments on the COCO, Fundus, and Chest X-ray datasets demonstrate that SAMAug can boost SAM's segmentation results, especially using the maximum distance and saliency model methods. SAMAug underscores the potential of visual prompt engineering to advance interactive computer vision models.