Large language models for biomedicine: foundations, opportunities, challenges, and best practices.

Journal: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
PMID:

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Generative large language models (LLMs) are a subset of transformers-based neural network architecture models. LLMs have successfully leveraged a combination of an increased number of parameters, improvements in computational efficiency, and large pre-training datasets to perform a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Using a few examples (few-shot) or no examples (zero-shot) for prompt-tuning has enabled LLMs to achieve state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of NLP applications. This article by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) NLP Working Group characterizes the opportunities, challenges, and best practices for our community to leverage and advance the integration of LLMs in downstream NLP applications effectively. This can be accomplished through a variety of approaches, including augmented prompting, instruction prompt tuning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

Authors

  • Satya S Sahoo
    Division of Medical Informatics, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.
  • Joseph M Plasek
    Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
  • Hua Xu
    Department of Urology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
  • Ozlem Uzuner
    Department of Information Studies, University at Albany, SUNY. Albany, NY.
  • Trevor Cohen
    University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
  • Meliha Yetisgen
    Departments of Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle2Departments of Linguistics, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle.
  • Hongfang Liu
    Department of Artificial Intelligence & Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States.
  • Stephane Meystre
    Stephane Meystre, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah and a Research Investigator in the IDEAS Center at the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System in Salt Lake City, UT.
  • Yanshan Wang
    Department of Health Sciences Research, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA.