Yunghwei Lai, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu
Synthetic data generation using large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising solution across various domains, particularly in medical field, to mitigate data collection challenges. However, existing studies mainly utilize LLMs to rewrite and complete existing medical records, where the limitations in data privacy, accuracy, and diversity sill exist, and additionally lack the ability to interact like real patients. To address these issues, we propose a realistic patient generation framework, Patient-Zero, which requires no real medical records. Patient-Zero first introduces a medically-aligned multi-step generation architecture, which builds comprehensive patient records through hierarchical medical knowledge injection without real medical records. Then, to optimize the virtual patient's interaction abilities with humans, Patient-Zero designs a dynamic updating mechanism to improve the consistency and conversational performance. Our framework enables the generation of contextually diverse patient records while maintaining strict medical coherence, supported by adaptive dialogue strategies and real-time clinical plausibility verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves good performance in accuracy, diversity, and consistency. After training with our generated virtual patients, existing models show significant improvements on the MedQA dataset.