Abstract:Assessing journal impact is central to scholarly communication, yet existing open resources rarely capture how collaboration structures and artificial intelligence (AI) research jointly shape venue prestige in biomedicine. We present BioMedJImpact, a large-scale, biomedical-oriented dataset designed to advance journal-level analysis of scientific impact and AI engagement. Built from 1.74 million PubMed Central articles across 2,744 journals, BioMedJImpact integrates bibliometric indicators, collaboration features, and LLM-derived semantic indicators for AI engagement. Specifically, the AI engagement feature is extracted through a reproducible three-stage LLM pipeline that we propose. Using this dataset, we analyze how collaboration intensity and AI engagement jointly influence scientific impact across pre- and post-pandemic periods (2016-2019, 2020-2023). Two consistent trends emerge: journals with higher collaboration intensity, particularly those with larger and more diverse author teams, tend to achieve greater citation impact, and AI engagement has become an increasingly strong correlate of journal prestige, especially in quartile rankings. To further validate the three-stage LLM pipeline we proposed for deriving the AI engagement feature, we conduct human evaluation, confirming substantial agreement in AI relevance detection and consistent subfield classification. Together, these contributions demonstrate that BioMedJImpact serves as both a comprehensive dataset capturing the intersection of biomedicine and AI, and a validated methodological framework enabling scalable, content-aware scientometric analysis of scientific impact and innovation dynamics. Code is available at https://github.com/JonathanWry/BioMedJImpact.




Abstract:Medical diagnosis prediction plays a critical role in disease detection and personalized healthcare. While machine learning (ML) models have been widely adopted for this task, their reliance on supervised training limits their ability to generalize to unseen cases, particularly given the high cost of acquiring large, labeled datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in leveraging language abilities and biomedical knowledge for diagnosis prediction. However, they often suffer from hallucinations, lack structured medical reasoning, and produce useless outputs. To address these challenges, we propose KERAP, a knowledge graph (KG)-enhanced reasoning approach that improves LLM-based diagnosis prediction through a multi-agent architecture. Our framework consists of a linkage agent for attribute mapping, a retrieval agent for structured knowledge extraction, and a prediction agent that iteratively refines diagnosis predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that KERAP enhances diagnostic reliability efficiently, offering a scalable and interpretable solution for zero-shot medical diagnosis prediction.




Abstract:Differential diagnosis is crucial for medicine as it helps healthcare providers systematically distinguish between conditions that share similar symptoms. This study assesses the impact of lab test results on differential diagnoses (DDx) made by large language models (LLMs). Clinical vignettes from 50 case reports from PubMed Central were created incorporating patient demographics, symptoms, and lab results. Five LLMs GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Llama-2-70b, Claude-2, and Mixtral-8x7B were tested to generate Top 10, Top 5, and Top 1 DDx with and without lab data. A comprehensive evaluation involving GPT-4, a knowledge graph, and clinicians was conducted. GPT-4 performed best, achieving 55% accuracy for Top 1 diagnoses and 60% for Top 10 with lab data, with lenient accuracy up to 80%. Lab results significantly improved accuracy, with GPT-4 and Mixtral excelling, though exact match rates were low. Lab tests, including liver function, metabolic/toxicology panels, and serology/immune tests, were generally interpreted correctly by LLMs for differential diagnosis.




Abstract:The growing availability of well-organized Electronic Health Records (EHR) data has enabled the development of various machine learning models towards disease risk prediction. However, existing risk prediction methods overlook the heterogeneity of complex diseases, failing to model the potential disease subtypes regarding their corresponding patient visits and clinical concept subgroups. In this work, we introduce TACCO, a novel framework that jointly discovers clusters of clinical concepts and patient visits based on a hypergraph modeling of EHR data. Specifically, we develop a novel self-supervised co-clustering framework that can be guided by the risk prediction task of specific diseases. Furthermore, we enhance the hypergraph model of EHR data with textual embeddings and enforce the alignment between the clusters of clinical concepts and patient visits through a contrastive objective. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the public MIMIC-III dataset and Emory internal CRADLE dataset over the downstream clinical tasks of phenotype classification and cardiovascular risk prediction demonstrate an average 31.25% performance improvement compared to traditional ML baselines and a 5.26% improvement on top of the vanilla hypergraph model without our co-clustering mechanism. In-depth model analysis, clustering results analysis, and clinical case studies further validate the improved utilities and insightful interpretations delivered by TACCO. Code is available at https://github.com/PericlesHat/TACCO.




Abstract:Linking (aligning) biomedical concepts across diverse data sources enables various integrative analyses, but it is challenging due to the discrepancies in concept naming conventions. Various strategies have been developed to overcome this challenge, such as those based on string-matching rules, manually crafted thesauri, and machine learning models. However, these methods are constrained by limited prior biomedical knowledge and can hardly generalize beyond the limited amounts of rules, thesauri, or training samples. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive results in diverse biomedical NLP tasks due to their unprecedentedly rich prior knowledge and strong zero-shot prediction abilities. However, LLMs suffer from issues including high costs, limited context length, and unreliable predictions. In this research, we propose PromptLink, a novel biomedical concept linking framework that leverages LLMs. It first employs a biomedical-specialized pre-trained language model to generate candidate concepts that can fit in the LLM context windows. Then it utilizes an LLM to link concepts through two-stage prompts, where the first-stage prompt aims to elicit the biomedical prior knowledge from the LLM for the concept linking task and the second-stage prompt enforces the LLM to reflect on its own predictions to further enhance their reliability. Empirical results on the concept linking task between two EHR datasets and an external biomedical KG demonstrate the effectiveness of PromptLink. Furthermore, PromptLink is a generic framework without reliance on additional prior knowledge, context, or training data, making it well-suited for concept linking across various types of data sources. The source code is available at https://github.com/constantjxyz/PromptLink.