RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

TL;DR

RareAgents is a novel LLM-driven multi-disciplinary decision-support system designed to improve diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases, addressing complex clinical challenges with advanced coordination and memory mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces RareAgents, the first multi-disciplinary team framework powered by LLMs specifically tailored for rare disease diagnosis and treatment, and provides a new rare disease dataset.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o in diagnosis accuracy

Utilizes advanced MDT coordination and memory mechanisms

Provides a new dataset for rare disease research

Abstract

Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience, make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team decision-support tool designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to facilitate further research in this field.