Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces Emulation, a framework for medical dialogue systems that aligns with clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes, providing transparent, reasoning-based responses to improve medical consultations.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that models clinicians' diagnostic reasoning and aligns responses with their thought processes, enhancing transparency and accuracy.

Findings

Effective response generation aligned with diagnostic reasoning

Enhanced transparency through explanation of reasoning process

Validated on two datasets with positive results

Abstract

Medical dialogue systems have attracted significant attention for their potential to act as medical assistants. Enabling these medical systems to emulate clinicians' diagnostic reasoning process has been the long-standing research focus. Previous studies rudimentarily realized the simulation of clinicians' diagnostic process by fine-tuning language models on high-quality dialogue datasets. Nonetheless, they overly focus on the outcomes of the clinician's reasoning process while ignoring their internal thought processes and alignment with clinician preferences. Our work aims to build a medical dialogue system that aligns with clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes. We propose a novel framework, Emulation, designed to generate an appropriate response that relies on abductive and deductive diagnostic reasoning analyses and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. Experimental results on two datasets confirm the efficacy of Emulation. Crucially, our framework furnishes clear explanations for the generated responses, enhancing its transparency in medical consultations.