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Main Authors: Liu, Zhaocheng, Tu, Quan, Ye, Wen, Xiao, Yu, Zhang, Zhishou, Cui, Hengfu, Zhu, Yalun, Ju, Qiang, Li, Shizheng, Xie, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09484
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author Liu, Zhaocheng
Tu, Quan
Ye, Wen
Xiao, Yu
Zhang, Zhishou
Cui, Hengfu
Zhu, Yalun
Ju, Qiang
Li, Shizheng
Xie, Jian
author_facet Liu, Zhaocheng
Tu, Quan
Ye, Wen
Xiao, Yu
Zhang, Zhishou
Cui, Hengfu
Zhu, Yalun
Ju, Qiang
Li, Shizheng
Xie, Jian
contents Recently, large language models have shown great potential to transform online medical consultation. Despite this, most research targets improving diagnostic accuracy with ample information, often overlooking the inquiry phase. Some studies try to evaluate or refine doctor models by using prompt-engineered patient agents. However, prompt engineering alone falls short in accurately simulating real patients. We need to explore new paradigms for patient simulation. Furthermore, the relationship between inquiry and diagnosis remains unexplored. This paper extracts dialogue strategies from real doctor-patient conversations to guide the training of a patient simulator. Our simulator shows higher anthropomorphism and lower hallucination rates, using dynamic dialogue strategies. This innovation offers a more accurate evaluation of diagnostic models and generates realistic synthetic data. We conduct extensive experiments on the relationship between inquiry and diagnosis, showing they adhere to Liebig's law: poor inquiry limits diagnosis effectiveness, regardless of diagnostic skill, and vice versa. The experiments also reveal substantial differences in inquiry performance among models. To delve into this phenomenon, the inquiry process is categorized into four distinct types. Analyzing the distribution of inquiries across these types helps explain the performance differences. The weights of our patient simulator are available https://github.com/PatientSimulator/PatientSimulator.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09484
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Inquiry-Diagnosis Relationship with Advanced Patient Simulators
Liu, Zhaocheng
Tu, Quan
Ye, Wen
Xiao, Yu
Zhang, Zhishou
Cui, Hengfu
Zhu, Yalun
Ju, Qiang
Li, Shizheng
Xie, Jian
Computation and Language
Recently, large language models have shown great potential to transform online medical consultation. Despite this, most research targets improving diagnostic accuracy with ample information, often overlooking the inquiry phase. Some studies try to evaluate or refine doctor models by using prompt-engineered patient agents. However, prompt engineering alone falls short in accurately simulating real patients. We need to explore new paradigms for patient simulation. Furthermore, the relationship between inquiry and diagnosis remains unexplored. This paper extracts dialogue strategies from real doctor-patient conversations to guide the training of a patient simulator. Our simulator shows higher anthropomorphism and lower hallucination rates, using dynamic dialogue strategies. This innovation offers a more accurate evaluation of diagnostic models and generates realistic synthetic data. We conduct extensive experiments on the relationship between inquiry and diagnosis, showing they adhere to Liebig's law: poor inquiry limits diagnosis effectiveness, regardless of diagnostic skill, and vice versa. The experiments also reveal substantial differences in inquiry performance among models. To delve into this phenomenon, the inquiry process is categorized into four distinct types. Analyzing the distribution of inquiries across these types helps explain the performance differences. The weights of our patient simulator are available https://github.com/PatientSimulator/PatientSimulator.
title Exploring the Inquiry-Diagnosis Relationship with Advanced Patient Simulators
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09484