40.8CYMay 22
IyàwóBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Model Clinical Triage Accuracy on Undifferentiated Febrile Illness in Nigerian Primary Health SettingsAnthonio Oladimeji Gabriel, Dimeji Abdulsobur Olawuyi, Oloruntoba Ajayi et al.
Background. Undifferentiated febrile illness is the leading cause of primary care outpatient visits in Nigeria, yet no validated benchmark exists for evaluating large language model (LLM) clinical triage reasoning in West African primary health settings. Methods. We introduce IyàwóBench v1.0, a dataset of 200 synthetic clinical vignettes across eight febrile illness categories derived from statistical distributions of 1,200 real patient encounters at 19 primary health centres (PHCs) in Oyo State, Nigeria. Six LLMs were evaluated on structured triage classification across two metrics: triage accuracy and safety score. Results. All six models achieved 100% safety scores (95% CI: 96.4-100.0%), never downgrading a critical REFER NOW case to TREAT HERE. Triage accuracy varied substantially: Claude Sonnet (claude-sonnet-4-5) 67.5% (95% CI: 60.8-73.7%), Llama 4 Scout 59.5% (52.5-66.2%), Llama 3.3 70B 43.0% (36.2-50.0%), and Llama 3.1 8B 39.0% (32.4-45.9%). Two models demonstrated near-zero accuracy attributable to structured output non-compliance. Conclusions. Modern LLMs exhibit safe triage behaviour but vary substantially in structured clinical accuracy. Clinically engineered systems with embedded WHO guidelines outperform general-purpose models by up to 28.5 percentage points. IyàwóBench provides the first reproducible evaluation framework for LLM clinical decision support in West African primary care.
15.5CYMay 16
Adversarial Fragility and Language Vulnerability in Clinical AI: A Systematic Audit of Diagnostic Collapse Under Imperceptible Perturbations and Cross-Lingual Drift in Low-Resource Healthcare SettingsAnthonio Oladimeji Gabriel, Ahmad Rufai Yusuf
Current clinical artificial intelligence (AI) systems are evaluated almost exclusively on clean, standardised, English-language inputs, conditions that do not reflect the realities of healthcare delivery in low-resource settings. This study presents the first systematic dual audit of two orthogonal safety vulnerabilities in clinical AI: adversarial image fragility and cross-lingual diagnostic drift. Using DenseNet121, the architecture underlying CheXNet, fine-tuned on the COVID-QU-Ex chest X-ray dataset (85,318 images; COVID-19, Non-COVID Pneumonia, Normal), we demonstrate that diagnostic accuracy collapses from 89.3% to 62.0% under a Fast Gradient Method (FGM) perturbation of epsilon=0.021, a magnitude imperceptible to the human eye. Standard defensive strategies including Gaussian smoothing and ensemble voting failed to restore clinical safety. In a parallel language fragility experiment, we tested Llama3.1:8b and NatLAS (N-ATLAS) on 20 COVID-19 clinical cases presented in Standard English, Nigerian Pidgin (Naija), and Yoruba-inflected English. Both models exhibited significant accuracy degradation: Llama3.1:8b dropped from 80.0% to 65.0% on Pidgin; NatLAS, an African-context model, collapsed from 85.0% to 55.0%, with diagnosis consistency falling to 50%. These findings establish a quantitative failure envelope for clinical AI under conditions representative of Primary Health Centre (PHC) deployment in Nigeria, and motivate urgent calls for adversarially hardened, linguistically inclusive clinical AI architectures.