Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data

Rumeng Li, Xun Wang, Hong Yu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can generate natural language texts for various domains and tasks, but their potential for clinical text mining, a domain with scarce, sensitive, and imbalanced medical data, is under-explored. We investigate whether LLMs can augment clinical data for detecting Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)-related signs and symptoms from electronic health records (EHRs), a challenging task that requires high expertise. We create a novel pragmatic taxonomy for AD sign and symptom progression based on expert knowledge and generated three datasets: (1) a gold dataset annotated by human experts on longitudinal EHRs of AD patients; (2) a silver dataset created by the data-to-label method, which labels sentences from a public EHR collection with AD-related signs and symptoms; and (3) a bronze dataset created by the label-to-data method which generates sentences with AD-related signs and symptoms based on the label definition. We train a system to detect AD-related signs and symptoms from EHRs. We find that the silver and bronze datasets improves the system performance, outperforming the system using only the gold dataset. This shows that LLMs can generate synthetic clinical data for a complex task by incorporating expert knowledge, and our label-to-data method can produce datasets that are free of sensitive information, while maintaining acceptable quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.474
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7129–7143
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.474
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.474
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rumeng Li, Xun Wang, and Hong Yu. 2023. Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7129–7143, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data (Li et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.474.pdf