Using text embedding models as text classifiers with medical data
This work addresses the need for precise and accurate medical diagnosis tools, though it is incremental as it adapts existing embedding methods to a specific domain.
The study tackled the challenge of applying LLMs to medical text classification by using text embedding models and vector databases, finding that higher embedding dimensions improved results but simple query data was optimal for performance.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) is promising and LLMs have been applied to numerous fields. However, it is not trivial to implement LLMs in the medical field, due to the high standards for precision and accuracy. Currently, the diagnosis of medical ailments must be done by hand, as it is costly to build a sufficiently broad LLM that can diagnose a wide range of diseases. Here, we explore the use of vector databases and embedding models as a means of encoding and classifying text with medical text data without the need to train a new model altogether. We used various LLMs to generate the medical data, then encoded the data with a text embedding model and stored it in a vector database. We hypothesized that higher embedding dimensions coupled with descriptive data in the vector database would lead to better classifications and designed a robustness test to test our hypothesis. By using vector databases and text embedding models to classify a clinician's notes on a patient presenting with a certain ailment, we showed that these tools can be successful at classifying medical text data. We found that a higher embedding dimension did indeed yield better results, however, querying with simple data in the database was optimal for performance. We have shown in this study the applicability of text embedding models and vector databases on a small scale, and our work lays the groundwork for applying these tools on a larger scale.