LLM-Match: An Open-Sourced Patient Matching Model Based on Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
This addresses the problem of efficiently linking patients to clinical trials for healthcare providers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing LLM and RAG techniques.
The authors tackled patient matching for clinical trials by proposing LLM-Match, a framework using fine-tuned large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, which outperformed baselines like TrialGPT and GPT-4 on four open datasets.
Patient matching is the process of linking patients to appropriate clinical trials by accurately identifying and matching their medical records with trial eligibility criteria. We propose LLM-Match, a novel framework for patient matching leveraging fine-tuned open-source large language models. Our approach consists of four key components. First, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module extracts relevant patient context from a vast pool of electronic health records (EHRs). Second, a prompt generation module constructs input prompts by integrating trial eligibility criteria (both inclusion and exclusion criteria), patient context, and system instructions. Third, a fine-tuning module with a classification head optimizes the model parameters using structured prompts and ground-truth labels. Fourth, an evaluation module assesses the fine-tuned model's performance on the testing datasets. We evaluated LLM-Match on four open datasets - n2c2, SIGIR, TREC 2021, and TREC 2022 - using open-source models, comparing it against TrialGPT, Zero-Shot, and GPT-4-based closed models. LLM-Match outperformed all baselines.