MedCoT: Medical Chain of Thought via Hierarchical Expert

Jiaxiang Liu, Yuan Wang, Jiawei Du, Joey Zhou, Zuozhu Liu


Abstract
Artificial intelligence has advanced in Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA), but prevalent research tends to focus on the accuracy of the answers, often overlooking the reasoning paths and interpretability, which are crucial in clinical settings. Besides, current Med-VQA algorithms, typically reliant on singular models, lack the robustness needed for real-world medical diagnostics which usually require collaborative expert evaluation. To address these shortcomings, this paper presents MedCoT, a novel hierarchical expert verification reasoning chain method designed to enhance interpretability and accuracy in biomedical imaging inquiries. MedCoT is predicated on two principles: The necessity for explicit reasoning paths in Med-VQA and the requirement for multi-expert review to formulate accurate conclusions. The methodology involves an Initial Specialist proposing diagnostic rationales, followed by a Follow-up Specialist who validates these rationales, and finally, a consensus is reached through a vote among a sparse Mixture of Experts within the locally deployed Diagnostic Specialist, which then provides the definitive diagnosis. Experimental evaluations on four standard Med-VQA datasets demonstrate that MedCoT surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, providing significant improvements in performance and interpretability.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.962
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:
17371–17389
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.962
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaxiang Liu, Yuan Wang, Jiawei Du, Joey Zhou, and Zuozhu Liu. 2024. MedCoT: Medical Chain of Thought via Hierarchical Expert. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 17371–17389, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedCoT: Medical Chain of Thought via Hierarchical Expert (Liu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.962.pdf
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