Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: He, Chengyang, Zhang, Wenlong, Chen, Violet Xinying, Ning, Yue, Wang, Ping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03051
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915227621130240
author He, Chengyang
Zhang, Wenlong
Chen, Violet Xinying
Ning, Yue
Wang, Ping
author_facet He, Chengyang
Zhang, Wenlong
Chen, Violet Xinying
Ning, Yue
Wang, Ping
contents Accurate medical symptom coding from unstructured clinical text, such as vaccine safety reports, is a critical task with applications in pharmacovigilance and safety monitoring. Symptom coding, as tailored in this study, involves identifying and linking nuanced symptom mentions to standardized vocabularies like MedDRA, differentiating it from broader medical coding tasks. Traditional approaches to this task, which treat symptom extraction and linking as independent workflows, often fail to handle the variability and complexity of clinical narratives, especially for rare cases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities but face challenges in achieving consistent performance. To address these issues, we propose Task as Context (TACO) Prompting, a novel framework that unifies extraction and linking tasks by embedding task-specific context into LLM prompts. Our study also introduces SYMPCODER, a human-annotated dataset derived from Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, and a two-stage evaluation framework to comprehensively assess both symptom linking and mention fidelity. Our comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs, including Llama2-chat, Jackalope-7b, GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o, demonstrates TACO's effectiveness in improving flexibility and accuracy for tailored tasks like symptom coding, paving the way for more specific coding tasks and advancing clinical text processing methodologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Task as Context Prompting for Accurate Medical Symptom Coding Using Large Language Models
He, Chengyang
Zhang, Wenlong
Chen, Violet Xinying
Ning, Yue
Wang, Ping
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate medical symptom coding from unstructured clinical text, such as vaccine safety reports, is a critical task with applications in pharmacovigilance and safety monitoring. Symptom coding, as tailored in this study, involves identifying and linking nuanced symptom mentions to standardized vocabularies like MedDRA, differentiating it from broader medical coding tasks. Traditional approaches to this task, which treat symptom extraction and linking as independent workflows, often fail to handle the variability and complexity of clinical narratives, especially for rare cases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities but face challenges in achieving consistent performance. To address these issues, we propose Task as Context (TACO) Prompting, a novel framework that unifies extraction and linking tasks by embedding task-specific context into LLM prompts. Our study also introduces SYMPCODER, a human-annotated dataset derived from Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, and a two-stage evaluation framework to comprehensively assess both symptom linking and mention fidelity. Our comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs, including Llama2-chat, Jackalope-7b, GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o, demonstrates TACO's effectiveness in improving flexibility and accuracy for tailored tasks like symptom coding, paving the way for more specific coding tasks and advancing clinical text processing methodologies.
title Task as Context Prompting for Accurate Medical Symptom Coding Using Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03051