medIKAL: Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis on EMRs

Mingyi Jia, Junwen Duan, Yan Song, Jianxin Wang


Abstract
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), while integral to modern healthcare, present challenges for clinical reasoning and diagnosis due to their complexity and information redundancy. To address this, we proposed medIKAL (Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs), a framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance diagnostic capabilities. medIKAL assigns weighted importance to entities in medical records based on their type, enabling precise localization of candidate diseases within KGs. It innovatively employs a residual network-like approach, allowing initial diagnosis by the LLM to be merged into KG search results. Through a path-based reranking algorithm and a fill-in-the-blank style prompt template, it further refined the diagnostic process. We validated medIKAL’s effectiveness through extensive experiments on a newly introduced open-sourced Chinese EMR dataset, demonstrating its potential to improve clinical diagnosis in real-world settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.624
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9278–9298
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.624/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Mingyi Jia, Junwen Duan, Yan Song, and Jianxin Wang. 2025. medIKAL: Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis on EMRs. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9278–9298, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
medIKAL: Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis on EMRs (Jia et al., COLING 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.624.pdf