English

Surpassing GPT-4 Medical Coding with a Two-Stage Approach

Computation and Language 2023-11-27 v1

Abstract

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show potential for clinical applications, such as clinical decision support and trial recommendations. However, the GPT-4 LLM predicts an excessive number of ICD codes for medical coding tasks, leading to high recall but low precision. To tackle this challenge, we introduce LLM-codex, a two-stage approach to predict ICD codes that first generates evidence proposals using an LLM and then employs an LSTM-based verification stage. The LSTM learns from both the LLM's high recall and human expert's high precision, using a custom loss function. Our model is the only approach that simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art results in medical coding accuracy, accuracy on rare codes, and sentence-level evidence identification to support coding decisions without training on human-annotated evidence according to experiments on the MIMIC dataset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.13735,
  title  = {Surpassing GPT-4 Medical Coding with a Two-Stage Approach},
  author = {Zhichao Yang and Sanjit Singh Batra and Joel Stremmel and Eran Halperin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.13735},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Extended Abstract presented at Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) symposium 2023, December 10th, 2023, New Orleans, United States, 19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:29:05.414Z