A Two-Stage Proactive Dialogue Generator for Efficient Clinical Information Collection Using Large Language Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-stage proactive dialogue system leveraging large language models to efficiently gather relevant clinical information from patients, improving diagnosis accuracy and interaction quality.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-stage recommendation framework with ranking criteria and an interactive patient agent for more flexible and effective medical dialogue generation.

Findings

Generated queries mimic real doctors' style

Achieved efficient and professional clinical conversations

Effectively collected relevant diagnostic information

Abstract

Efficient patient-doctor interaction is among the key factors for a successful disease diagnosis. During the conversation, the doctor could query complementary diagnostic information, such as the patient's symptoms, previous surgery, and other related information that goes beyond medical evidence data (test results) to enhance disease diagnosis. However, this procedure is usually time-consuming and less-efficient, which can be potentially optimized through computer-assisted systems. As such, we propose a diagnostic dialogue system to automate the patient information collection procedure. By exploiting medical history and conversation logic, our conversation agents, particularly the doctor agent, can pose multi-round clinical queries to effectively collect the most relevant disease diagnostic information. Moreover, benefiting from our two-stage recommendation structure, carefully designed ranking criteria, and interactive patient agent, our model is able to overcome the under-exploration and non-flexible challenges in dialogue generation. Our experimental results on a real-world medical conversation dataset show that our model can generate clinical queries that mimic the conversation style of real doctors, with efficient fluency, professionalism, and safety, while effectively collecting relevant disease diagnostic information.