DiversityMedQA: A Benchmark for Assessing Demographic Biases in Medical Diagnosis using Large Language Models

Rajat Rawat, Hudson McBride, Dhiyaan Chakkresh Nirmal, Rajarshi Ghosh, Jong Moon, Dhruv Karthik Alamuri, Kevin Zhu


Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) gain traction in healthcare, concerns about their susceptibility to demographic biases are growing. We introduce DiversityMedQA, a novel benchmark designed to assess LLM responses to medical queries across diverse patient demographics, such as gender and ethnicity. By perturbing questions from the MedQA dataset, which comprises of medical board exam questions, we created a benchmark that captures the nuanced differences in medical diagnosis across varying patient profiles. To ensure that our perturbations did not alter the clinical outcomes, we implemented a filtering strategy to validate each perturbation, so that any performance discrepancies would be indicative of bias. Our findings reveal notable discrepancies in model performance when tested against these demographic variations. By releasing DiversityMedQA, we provide a resource for evaluating and mitigating demographic bias in LLM medical diagnoses.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Giorgio Piatti, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
334–348
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.29
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rajat Rawat, Hudson McBride, Dhiyaan Chakkresh Nirmal, Rajarshi Ghosh, Jong Moon, Dhruv Karthik Alamuri, and Kevin Zhu. 2024. DiversityMedQA: A Benchmark for Assessing Demographic Biases in Medical Diagnosis using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 334–348, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DiversityMedQA: A Benchmark for Assessing Demographic Biases in Medical Diagnosis using Large Language Models (Rawat et al., NLP4PI 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.29.pdf