The Radiation Oncology NLP Database

TL;DR

The Radiation Oncology NLP Database (ROND) is a specialized dataset for NLP tasks in radiation oncology, supporting research with diverse tasks and a large instruction-tuning dataset, including a trained large language model, CancerChat.

Contribution

ROND is the first dedicated NLP dataset for radiation oncology, enabling domain-specific NLP research and development with multiple tasks and a large instruction-tuning dataset.

Findings

Developed a comprehensive radiation oncology NLP dataset (ROND)

Created an instruction-tuning dataset with over 20k pairs

Trained a large language model, CancerChat, demonstrating domain-specific NLP capabilities

Abstract

We present the Radiation Oncology NLP Database (ROND), the first dedicated Natural Language Processing (NLP) dataset for radiation oncology, an important medical specialty that has received limited attention from the NLP community in the past. With the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there is an increasing need for specialized datasets and benchmarks to facilitate research and development. ROND is specifically designed to address this gap in the domain of radiation oncology, a field that offers many opportunities for NLP exploration. It encompasses various NLP tasks including Logic Reasoning, Text Classification, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Question Answering (QA), Text Summarization, and Patient-Clinician Conversations, each with a distinct focus on radiation oncology concepts and application cases. In addition, we have developed an instruction-tuning dataset consisting of over 20k instruction pairs (based on ROND) and trained a large language model, CancerChat. This serves to demonstrate the potential of instruction-tuning large language models within a highly-specialized medical domain. The evaluation results in this study could serve as baseline results for future research. ROND aims to stimulate advancements in radiation oncology and clinical NLP by offering a platform for testing and improving algorithms and models in a domain-specific context. The ROND dataset is a joint effort of multiple U.S. health institutions. The data is available at https://github.com/zl-liu/Radiation-Oncology-NLP-Database.