Merlin Engelke
Author directory2026
Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why
Osman Alperen Çinar-Koraş | Marie Bauer | Sameh Khattab | Merlin Engelke | Moon Kim | Stephan Settelmeier | Shigeyasu Sugawara | Fabian Freisleben | Felix Nensa | Jens Kleesiek
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Osman Alperen Çinar-Koraş | Marie Bauer | Sameh Khattab | Merlin Engelke | Moon Kim | Stephan Settelmeier | Shigeyasu Sugawara | Fabian Freisleben | Felix Nensa | Jens Kleesiek
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We report on the deployment of ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passages for clinician verification. We quantify the metadata gap, trace the architectural decisions it shaped, and evaluate extraction alongside an independent retrospective lymphoma registry study, in which nuclear-medicine physicians verify every extracted value against its cited sources. Across 7,326 clinician judgments on this lymphoma-registry workflow, 96.5% of extractions were accepted, with per-type acceptance ranging from 80% to 99%.