Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark

Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton


Abstract
The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.759
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13696–13710
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.759
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.759
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, and David A. Clifton. 2024. Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13696–13710, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (Liu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.759.pdf
Data:
 2024.emnlp-main.759.data.zip