LLMs-based Few-Shot Disease Predictions using EHR: A Novel Approach Combining Predictive Agent Reasoning and Critical Agent Instruction.

Journal: AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium
Published Date:

Abstract

Electronic health records (EHRs) contain valuable patient data for health-related prediction tasks, such as disease prediction. Traditional approaches rely on supervised learning methods that require large labeled datasets, which can be expensive and challenging to obtain. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert structured patient visit data (e.g., diagnoses, labs, prescriptions) into natural language narratives. We evaluate the zero-shot and few-shot performance of LLMs using various EHR-prediction-oriented prompting strategies. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach that utilizes LLM agents with different roles: a predictor agent that makes predictions and generates reasoning processes and a critic agent that analyzes incorrect predictions and provides guidance for improving the reasoning of the predictor agent. Our results demonstrate that with the proposed approach, LLMs can achieve decent few-shot performance compared to traditional supervised learning methods in EHR-based disease predictions, suggesting its potential for health-oriented applications.

Authors

  • Hejie Cui
  • Zhuocheng Shen
    Department of Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
  • Jieyu Zhang
    Zhejiang A&F University, College of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Hangzhou 311300, PR China. Electronic address: 20220120@zafu.edu.cn.
  • Hui Shao
    Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, College of Pharmacy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America.
  • Lianhui Qin
    Department of Computer Science & Engineering, UCSD, San Diego, CA, USA.
  • Joyce C Ho
    Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
  • Carl Yang
    Department of Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, United States.