ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging pre-trained large language models for aphasia detection in English and Chinese speakers (2024)

We explore the utility of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) in detecting the presence, subtypes, and severity of aphasia across English and Mandarin Chinese speakers. Our investigation suggests that even without fine-tuning or domain-specific training, pre-trained LLMs can offer some insights on language disorders, regardless of speakers' first language. Our analysis also reveals noticeable differences between English and Chinese LLMs. While the English LLMs exhibit near-chance level accuracy in subtyping aphasia, the Chinese counterparts demonstrate less than satisfactory performance in distinguishing between individuals with and without aphasia. This research advocates for the importance of linguistically tailored and specified approaches in leveraging LLMs for clinical applications, especially in the context of multilingual populations.
Fusion of Domain-Adapted Vision and Language Models for Medical Visual Question Answering (2024)

Vision-language models, while effective in general domains and showing strong performance in diverse multi-modal applications like visual question-answering (VQA), struggle to maintain the same level of effectiveness in more specialized domains, e.g., medical. We propose a medical vision-language model that integrates large vision and language models adapted for the medical domain. This model goes through three stages of parameter-efficient training using three separate biomedical and radiology multi-modal visual and text datasets. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SLAKE 1.0 medical VQA (MedVQA) dataset with an overall accuracy of 87.5{\%} and demonstrates strong performance on another MedVQA dataset, VQA-RAD, achieving an overall accuracy of 73.2{\%}.
LLM-Based Section Identifiers Excel on Open Source but Stumble in Real World Applications (2024)

Electronic health records (EHR) even though a boon for healthcare practitioners, are grow- ing convoluted and longer every day. Sifting around these lengthy EHRs is taxing and be- comes a cumbersome part of physician-patient interaction. Several approaches have been pro- posed to help alleviate this prevalent issue ei- ther via summarization or sectioning, however, only a few approaches have truly been helpful in the past. With the rise of automated methods, machine learning (ML) has shown promise in solving the task of identifying relevant sections in EHR. However, most ML methods rely on labeled data which is difficult to get in health- care. Large language models (LLMs) on the other hand, have performed impressive feats in natural language processing (NLP), that too in a zero-shot manner, i.e. without any labeled data. To that end, we propose using LLMs to identify relevant section headers. We find that GPT-4 can effectively solve the task on both zero and few-shot settings as well as segment dramatically better than state-of-the-art meth- ods. Additionally, we also annotate a much harder real world dataset and find that GPT-4 struggles to perform well, alluding to further research and harder benchmarks.
Adapting Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing to the Clinical Narrative -- the SPRING THYME parser (2024)

This paper is dedicated to the design and evaluation of the first AMR parser tailored for clinical notes. Our objective was to facilitate the precise transformation of the clinical notes into structured AMR expressions, thereby enhancing the interpretability and usability of clinical text data at scale. Leveraging the colon cancer dataset from the Temporal Histories of Your Medical Events (THYME) corpus, we adapted a state-of-the-art AMR parser utilizing continuous training. Our approach incorporates data augmentation techniques to enhance the accuracy of AMR structure predictions. Notably, through this learning strategy, our parser achieved an impressive F1 score of 88{\%} on the THYME corpus`s colon cancer dataset. Moreover, our research delved into the efficacy of data required for domain adaptation within the realm of clinical notes, presenting domain adaptation data requirements for AMR parsing. This exploration not only underscores the parser`s robust performance but also highlights its potential in facilitating a deeper understanding of clinical narratives through structured semantic representations.
SERPENT-VLM : Self-Refining Radiology Report Generation Using Vision Language Models (2024)

Radiology Report Generation (R2Gen) demonstrates how Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can automate the creation of accurate and coherent radiological reports. Existing methods often hallucinate details in text-based reports that don`t accurately reflect the image content. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel strategy, SERPENT-VLM (SElf Refining Radiology RePort GENeraTion using Vision Language Models), which improves the R2Gen task by integrating a self-refining mechanism into the MLLM framework. We employ a unique self-supervised loss that leverages similarity between pooled image representations and the contextual representations of the generated radiological text, alongside the standard Causal Language Modeling objective, to refine image-text representations. This allows the model to scrutinize and align the generated text through dynamic interaction between a given image and the generated text, therefore reducing hallucination and continuously enhancing nuanced report generation. SERPENT-VLM outperforms existing baselines such as LlaVA-Med, BiomedGPT, etc., achieving SoTA performance on the IU X-ray and Radiology Objects in COntext (ROCO) datasets, and also proves to be robust against noisy images. A qualitative case study emphasizes the significant advancements towards more sophisticated MLLM frameworks for R2Gen, opening paths for further research into self-supervised refinement in the medical imaging domain.
ERD: A Framework for Improving LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Classification (2024)

Improving the accessibility of psychotherapy with the aid of Large Language Models (LLMs) is garnering a significant attention in recent years. Recognizing cognitive distortions from the interviewee`s utterances can be an essential part of psychotherapy, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy. In this paper, we propose ERD, which improves LLM-based cognitive distortion classification performance with the aid of additional modules of (1) extracting the parts related to cognitive distortion, and (2) debating the reasoning steps by multiple agents. Our experimental results on a public dataset show that ERD improves the multi-class F1 score as well as binary specificity score. Regarding the latter score, it turns out that our method is effective in debiasing the baseline method which has high false positive rate, especially when the summary of multi-agent debate is provided to LLMs.
Leveraging Prompt-Learning for Structured Information Extraction from Crohn`s Disease Radiology Reports in a Low-Resource Language (2024)

Automatic conversion of free-text radiology reports into structured data using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques is crucial for analyzing diseases on a large scale. While effective for tasks in widely spoken languages like English, generative large language models (LLMs) typically underperform with less common languages and can pose potential risks to patient privacy. Fine-tuning local NLP models is hindered by the skewed nature of real-world medical datasets, where rare findings represent a significant data imbalance. We introduce SMP-BERT, a novel prompt learning method that leverages the structured nature of reports to overcome these challenges. In our studies involving a substantial collection of Crohn`s disease radiology reports in Hebrew (over 8,000 patients and 10,000 reports), SMP-BERT greatly surpassed traditional fine-tuning methods in performance, notably in detecting infrequent conditions (AUC: 0.99 vs 0.94, F1: 0.84 vs 0.34). SMP-BERT empowers more accurate AI diagnostics available for low-resource languages.
Context Aggregation with Topic-focused Summarization for Personalized Medical Dialogue Generation (2024)

In the realm of dialogue systems, generated responses often lack personalization. This is particularly true in the medical domain, where research is limited by scarce available domain-specific data and the complexities of modeling medical context and persona information. In this work, we investigate the potential of harnessing large language models for personalized medical dialogue generation. In particular, to better aggregate the long conversational context, we adopt topic-focused summarization to distill core information from the dialogue history, and use such information to guide the conversation flow and generated content. Drawing inspiration from real-world telehealth conversations, we outline a comprehensive pipeline encompassing data processing, profile construction, and domain adaptation. This work not only highlights our technical approach but also shares distilled insights from the data preparation and model construction phases.
Evaluating Lexicon Incorporation for Depression Symptom Estimation (2024)

This paper explores the impact of incorporating sentiment, emotion, and domain-specific lexicons into a transformer-based model for depression symptom estimation. Lexicon information is added by marking the words in the input transcripts of patient-therapist conversations as well as in social media posts. Overall results show that the introduction of external knowledge within pre-trained language models can be beneficial for prediction performance, while different lexicons show distinct behaviours depending on the targeted task. Additionally, new state-of-the-art results are obtained for the estimation of depression level over patient-therapist interviews.
Semi-automatic Construction of a Word Complexity Lexicon for Japanese Medical Terminology (2024)

We construct a word complexity lexicon for medical terms in Japanese.To facilitate communication between medical practitioners and patients, medical text simplification is being studied.Medical text simplification is a natural language processing task that paraphrases complex technical terms into expressions that patients can understand.However, in contrast to English, where this task is being actively studied, there are insufficient language resources in Japanese.As a first step in advancing research on medical text simplification in Japanese, we annotate the 370,000 words from a large-scale medical terminology lexicon with a five-point scale of complexity for patients.
TEAM MIPAL at MEDIQA-M3G 2024: Large VQA Models for Dermatological Diagnosis (2024)

This paper describes the methods used for the NAACL 2024 workshop MEDIQA-M3G shared task for generating medical answers from image and query data for skin diseases. MedVInT-Decoder, LLaVA, and LLaVA-Med are chosen as base models. Finetuned with the task dataset on the dermatological domain, MedVInT-Decoder achieved a BLEU score of 3.82 during competition, while LLaVA and LLaVA-Med reached 6.98 and 4.62 afterward, respectively.
MediFact at MEDIQA-M3G 2024: Medical Question Answering in Dermatology with Multimodal Learning (2024)

The MEDIQA-M3G 2024 challenge necessitates novel solutions for Multilingual {\&} Multimodal Medical Answer Generation in dermatology (wai Yim et al., 2024a). This paper addresses the limitations of traditional methods by proposing a weakly supervised learning approach for open-ended medical question-answering (QA). Our system leverages readily available MEDIQA-M3G images via a VGG16-CNN-SVM model, enabling multilingual (English, Chinese, Spanish) learning of informative skin condition representations. Using pre-trained QA models, we further bridge the gap between visual and textual information through multimodal fusion. This approach tackles complex, open-ended questions even without predefined answer choices. We empower the generation of comprehensive answers by feeding the ViT-CLIP model with multiple responses alongside images. This work advances medical QA research, paving the way for clinical decision support systems and ultimately improving healthcare delivery.
MediFact at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Why AI Needs a Human Touch (2024)

Accurate representation of medical information is crucial for patient safety, yet artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), encounter challenges in error-free clinical text interpretation. This paper presents a novel approach submitted to the MEDIQA-CORR 2024 shared task k (Ben Abacha et al., 2024a), focusing on the automatic correction of single-word errors in clinical notes. Unlike LLMs that rely on extensive generic data, our method emphasizes extracting contextually relevant information from available clinical text data. Leveraging an ensemble of extractive and abstractive question-answering approaches, we construct a supervised learning framework with domain-specific feature engineering. Our methodology incorporates domain expertise to enhance error correction accuracy. By integrating domain expertise and prioritizing meaningful information extraction, our approach underscores the significance of a human-centric strategy in adapting AI for healthcare.
KnowLab\_AIMed at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Chain-of-Though (CoT) prompting strategies for medical error detection and correction (2024)

This paper describes our submission to the MEDIQA-CORR 2024 shared task for automatically detecting and correcting medical errors in clinical notes. We report results for three methods of few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) augmented with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and reason prompts using a large language model (LLM). In the first method, we manually analyse a subset of train and validation dataset to infer three CoT prompts by examining error types in the clinical notes. In the second method, we utilise the training dataset to prompt the LLM to deduce reasons about their correctness or incorrectness. The constructed CoTs and reasons are then augmented with ICL examples to solve the tasks of error detection, span identification, and error correction. Finally, we combine the two methods using a rule-based ensemble method. Across the three sub-tasks, our ensemble method achieves a ranking of 3rd for both sub-task 1 and 2, while securing 7th place in sub-task 3 among all submissions.
PromptMind Team at EHRSQL-2024: Improving Reliability of SQL Generation using Ensemble LLMs (2024)

This paper presents our approach to the EHRSQL-2024 shared task, which aims to develop a reliable Text-to-SQL system for electronic health records. We propose two approaches that leverage large language models (LLMs) for prompting and fine-tuning to generate EHRSQL queries. In both techniques, we concentrate on bridging the gap between the real-world knowledge on which LLMs are trained and the domain-specific knowledge required for the task. The paper provides the results of each approach individually, demonstrating that they achieve high execution accuracy. Additionally, we show that an ensemble approach further enhances generation reliability by reducing errors. This approach secured us 2nd place in the shared task competition. The methodologies outlined in this paper are designed to be transferable to domain-specific Text-to-SQL problems that emphasize both accuracy and reliability.
PromptMind Team at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Improving Clinical Text Correction with Error Categorization and LLM Ensembles (2024)

This paper describes our approach to the MEDIQA-CORR shared task, which involves error detection and correction in clinical notes curated by medical professionals. This task involves handling three subtasks: detecting the presence of errors, identifying the specific sentence containing the error, and correcting it. Through our work, we aim to assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on a vast corpora of internet data that contain both factual and unreliable information. We propose to comprehensively address all subtasks together, and suggest employing a unique prompt-based in-context learning strategy. We will evaluate its efficacy in this specialized task demanding a combination of general reasoning and medical knowledge. In medical systems where prediction errors can have grave consequences, we propose leveraging self-consistency and ensemble methods to enhance error correction and error detection performance.
Maven at MEDIQA-CORR 2024: Leveraging RAG and Medical LLM for Error Detection and Correction in Medical Notes (2024)

Addressing the critical challenge of identifying and rectifying medical errors in clinical notes, we present a novel approach tailored for the MEDIQA-CORR task @ NAACL-ClinicalNLP 2024, which comprises three subtasks: binary classification, span identification, and natural language generation for error detection and correction. Binary classification involves detecting whether the text contains a medical error; span identification entails identifying the text span associated with any detected error; and natural language generation focuses on providing a free text correction if a medical error exists. Our proposed architecture leverages Named Entity Recognition (NER) for identifying disease-related terms, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextual understanding from external datasets, and a quantized and fine-tuned Palmyra model for error correction. Our model achieved a global rank of 5 with an aggregate score of 0.73298, calculated as the mean of ROUGE-1-F, BERTScore, and BLEURT scores.
LAILab at Chemotimelines 2024: Finetuning sequence-to-sequence language models for temporal relation extraction towards cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy treatment (2024)

In this paper, we report our effort to tackle the challenge of extracting chemotimelines from EHR notes across a dataset of three cancer types. We focus on the two subtasks: 1) detection and classification of temporal relations given the annotated chemotherapy events and time expressions and 2) directly extracting patient chemotherapy timelines from EHR notes. We address both subtasks using Large Language Models. Our best-performing methods in both subtasks use Flan-T5, an instruction-tuned language model. Our proposed system achieves the highest average score in both subtasks. Our results underscore the effectiveness of finetuning general-domain large language models in domain-specific and unseen tasks.
Lexicans at Chemotimelines 2024: Chemotimeline Chronicles - Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Temporal Relations Extraction in Oncological Electronic Health Records (2024)

Automatic generation of chemotherapy treatment timelines from electronic health records (EHRs) notes not only streamlines clinical workflows but also promotes better coordination and improvements in cancer treatment and quality of care. This paper describes the submission to the Chemotimelines 2024 shared task that aims to automatically build a chemotherapy treatment timeline for each patient using their complete set of EHR notes, spanning various sources such as primary care provider, oncology, discharge summaries, emergency department, pathology, radiology, and more. We report results from two large language models (LLMs), namely Llama 2 and Mistral 7B, applied to the shared task data using zero-shot prompting.
Team NLPeers at Chemotimelines 2024: Evaluation of two timeline extraction methods, can generative LLM do it all or is smaller model fine-tuning still relevant ? (2024)

This paper presents our two deep learning-based approaches to participate in subtask 1 of the Chemotimelines 2024 Shared task. The first uses a fine-tuning strategy on a relatively small general domain Masked Language Model (MLM) model, with additional normalization steps obtained using a simple Large Language Model (LLM) prompting technique. The second is an LLM-based approach combining advanced automated prompt search with few-shot in-context learning using the DSPy framework.Our results confirm the continued relevance of the smaller MLM fine-tuned model. It also suggests that the automated few-shot LLM approach can perform close to the fine-tuning-based method without extra LLM normalization and be advantageous under scarce data access conditions. We finally hint at the possibility to choose between lower training examples or lower computing resources requirements when considering both methods.
KCLab at Chemotimelines 2024: End-to-end system for chemotherapy timeline extraction -- Subtask2 (2024)

This paper presents our participation in the Chemotimelines 2024 subtask2, focusing on the development of an end-to-end system for chemotherapy timeline extraction. We initially adopt a basic framework from subtask2, utilizing Apache cTAKES for entity recognition and a BERT-based model for classifying the temporal relationship between chemotherapy events and associated times. Subsequently, we enhance this pipeline through two key directions: first, by expanding the exploration of the system, achieved by extending the search dictionary of cTAKES with the UMLS database; second, by reducing false positives through preprocessing of clinical notes and implementing filters to reduce the potential errors from the BERT-based model. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct extensive experiments using clinical notes from breast, ovarian, and melanoma cancer cases. Our results demonstrate improvements over the previous approach.
Project PRIMUS at EHRSQL 2024 : Text-to-SQL Generation using Large Language Model for EHR Analysis (2024)

This paper explores the application of the sqlcoders model, a pre-trained neural network, for automatic SQL query generation from natural language questions. We focus on the model`s internal functionality and demonstrate its effectiveness on a domain-specific validation dataset provided by EHRSQL. The sqlcoders model, based on transformers with attention mechanisms, has been trained on paired examples of natural language questions and corresponding SQL queries. It takes advantage of a carefully crafted prompt that incorporates the database schema alongside the question to guide the model towards the desired output format.
NYULangone at Chemotimelines 2024: Utilizing Open-Weights Large Language Models for Chemotherapy Event Extraction (2024)

The extraction of chemotherapy treatment timelines from clinical narratives poses significant challenges due to the complexity of medical language and patient-specific treatment regimens. This paper describes the NYULangone team`s approach to Subtask 2 of the Chemotimelines 2024 shared task, focusing on leveraging a locally hosted Large Language Model (LLM), Mixtral 8x7B (Mistral AI, France), to interpret and extract relevant events from clinical notes without relying on domain-specific training data. Despite facing challenges due to the task`s complexity and the current capacity of open-source AI, our methodology highlights the future potential of local foundational LLMs in specialized domains like biomedical data processing.