RAD-PHI2: Instruction Tuning PHI-2 for Radiology
This work addresses the need for efficient AI tools in radiology workflows, offering a domain-specific solution that is incremental by adapting existing SLMs to medical data.
The researchers tackled the problem of applying small language models (SLMs) to radiology by fine-tuning Phi-2 on radiology-specific data, resulting in Rad-Phi2 models that perform comparably or outperform larger models like Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 and GPT-4 in answering radiology queries and handling report-related tasks.
Small Language Models (SLMs) have shown remarkable performance in general domain language understanding, reasoning and coding tasks, but their capabilities in the medical domain, particularly concerning radiology text, is less explored. In this study, we investigate the application of SLMs for general radiology knowledge specifically question answering related to understanding of symptoms, radiological appearances of findings, differential diagnosis, assessing prognosis, and suggesting treatments w.r.t diseases pertaining to different organ systems. Additionally, we explore the utility of SLMs in handling text-related tasks with respect to radiology reports within AI-driven radiology workflows. We fine-tune Phi-2, a SLM with 2.7 billion parameters using high-quality educational content from Radiopaedia, a collaborative online radiology resource. The resulting language model, RadPhi-2-Base, exhibits the ability to address general radiology queries across various systems (e.g., chest, cardiac). Furthermore, we investigate Phi-2 for instruction tuning, enabling it to perform specific tasks. By fine-tuning Phi-2 on both general domain tasks and radiology-specific tasks related to chest X-ray reports, we create Rad-Phi2. Our empirical results reveal that Rad-Phi2 Base and Rad-Phi2 perform comparably or even outperform larger models such as Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 and GPT-4 providing concise and precise answers. In summary, our work demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of utilizing SLMs in radiology workflows both for knowledge related queries as well as for performing specific tasks related to radiology reports thereby opening up new avenues for enhancing the quality and efficiency of radiology practice.