Aarav Singh
Author directory2026
NSIDDx: A Design Framework for Neuro-Symbolic, Practitioner-First Differential Diagnosis in Low-Resource Settings
Aarav Singh
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Aarav Singh
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
LLM-based diagnostic systems achieve high semantic accuracy on benchmarks, but open-ended evaluation on clinically uncommon presentations reveals a systematic gap between headline accuracy and verifiable clinical reliability. We evaluate an LLM+rare-disease RAG pipeline across two cohorts and show that the paradigm produces confident outputs that are frequently unverifiable and systematically resistant to clinician interrogation. We present NSIDDx (Neuro-Symbolic Integrated Differential Diagnosis System), a design framework arguing that DDx systems in low-resource settings must treat the clinician as an active reasoning agent. We instantiate this through a neuro-symbolic pipeline with ternary symptom encoding, contradiction detection, audit strings, and practitioner override — running offline on consumer hardware. We distill five design principles for clinician-in-the-loop clinical NLP and invite the prospective studies needed to validate the claim at scale.