CliBench: A Multifaceted and Multigranular Evaluation of Large Language Models for Clinical Decision Making

TL;DR

This paper introduces CliBench, a comprehensive benchmark from MIMIC IV to evaluate large language models' performance in diverse, real-world clinical decision-making tasks, highlighting their potential and current limitations.

Contribution

We developed CliBench, a multifaceted benchmark for assessing LLMs in clinical diagnosis, covering various specialties and tasks with structured evaluation metrics.

Findings

LLMs show promise in clinical diagnosis but have notable limitations.

Structured, multi-granular evaluation reveals strengths and weaknesses of LLMs.

Benchmark facilitates realistic assessment of LLMs in healthcare applications.

Abstract

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), into the clinical diagnosis process offers significant potential to improve the efficiency and accessibility of medical care. While LLMs have shown some promise in the medical domain, their application in clinical diagnosis remains underexplored, especially in real-world clinical practice, where highly sophisticated, patient-specific decisions need to be made. Current evaluations of LLMs in this field are often narrow in scope, focusing on specific diseases or specialties and employing simplified diagnostic tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce CliBench, a novel benchmark developed from the MIMIC IV dataset, offering a comprehensive and realistic assessment of LLMs' capabilities in clinical diagnosis. This benchmark not only covers diagnoses from a diverse range of medical cases across various specialties but also incorporates tasks of clinical significance: treatment procedure identification, lab test ordering and medication prescriptions. Supported by structured output ontologies, CliBench enables a precise and multi-granular evaluation, offering an in-depth understanding of LLM's capability on diverse clinical tasks of desired granularity. We conduct a zero-shot evaluation of leading LLMs to assess their proficiency in clinical decision-making. Our preliminary results shed light on the potential and limitations of current LLMs in clinical settings, providing valuable insights for future advancements in LLM-powered healthcare.