Automating PTSD Diagnostics in Clinical Interviews: Leveraging Large Language Models for Trauma Assessments

Sichang Tu, Abigail Powers, Natalie Merrill, Negar Fani, Sierra Carter, Stephen Doogan, Jinho D. Choi


Abstract
The shortage of clinical workforce presents significant challenges in mental healthcare, limiting access to formal diagnostics and services. We aim to tackle this shortage by integrating a customized large language model (LLM) into the workflow, thus promoting equity in mental healthcare for the general population. Although LLMs have showcased their capability in clinical decision-making, their adaptation to severe conditions like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we collect 411 clinician-administered diagnostic interviews and devise a novel approach to obtain high-quality data. Moreover, we build a comprehensive framework to automate PTSD diagnostic assessments based on interview contents by leveraging two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and Llama-2, with potential for broader clinical diagnoses. Our results illustrate strong promise for LLMs, tested on our dataset, to aid clinicians in diagnostic validation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AI system that fully automates assessments for mental illness based on clinician-administered interviews.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.55
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
644–663
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.55
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sichang Tu, Abigail Powers, Natalie Merrill, Negar Fani, Sierra Carter, Stephen Doogan, and Jinho D. Choi. 2024. Automating PTSD Diagnostics in Clinical Interviews: Leveraging Large Language Models for Trauma Assessments. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 644–663, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automating PTSD Diagnostics in Clinical Interviews: Leveraging Large Language Models for Trauma Assessments (Tu et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.55.pdf