RDMA: Cost Effective Agent-Driven Rare Disease Mining from Electronic Health Records

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, John, Cross, Adam, Sun, Jimeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wu, John
Cross, Adam
Sun, Jimeng
author_facet Wu, John
Cross, Adam
Sun, Jimeng
contents Rare diseases affect 1 in 10 Americans yet remain systematically underdocumented in clinical records. ICD-based systems cannot capture their breadth, over 50\% of Orphanet codes lack a direct ICD mapping and only 2.2\% of HPO codes have matching ICD codes, leaving patient populations invisible and delaying diagnosis. Mining unstructured clinical notes offers a direct path forward, but real notes are long, noisy, and abbreviation-dense, and limited annotations make fine-tuning infeasible, demanding approaches that generalize without task-specific training. We present Rare Disease Mining Agents (RDMA), an agentic framework equipping smaller quantized LLMs with tools for abbreviation resolution, implicit phenotype reasoning, and ontology grounding against Orphanet and HPO. RDMA substantially outperforms fine-tuned and RAG-based baselines across benchmarks with different data characteristics, without any task-specific training. A small quantized model achieves maximal performance, reducing inference costs by up to 10x and local hardware costs by up to 17x, enabling private deployment on standard hardware without cloud-based PHI exposure. RDMA's uncertainty-flagging mechanism further reduces expert annotation burden while preserving agreement quality, supporting scalable rare disease documentation in clinical practice. Available at https://github.com/jhnwu3/RDMA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15867
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RDMA: Cost Effective Agent-Driven Rare Disease Mining from Electronic Health Records
Wu, John
Cross, Adam
Sun, Jimeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
Rare diseases affect 1 in 10 Americans yet remain systematically underdocumented in clinical records. ICD-based systems cannot capture their breadth, over 50\% of Orphanet codes lack a direct ICD mapping and only 2.2\% of HPO codes have matching ICD codes, leaving patient populations invisible and delaying diagnosis. Mining unstructured clinical notes offers a direct path forward, but real notes are long, noisy, and abbreviation-dense, and limited annotations make fine-tuning infeasible, demanding approaches that generalize without task-specific training. We present Rare Disease Mining Agents (RDMA), an agentic framework equipping smaller quantized LLMs with tools for abbreviation resolution, implicit phenotype reasoning, and ontology grounding against Orphanet and HPO. RDMA substantially outperforms fine-tuned and RAG-based baselines across benchmarks with different data characteristics, without any task-specific training. A small quantized model achieves maximal performance, reducing inference costs by up to 10x and local hardware costs by up to 17x, enabling private deployment on standard hardware without cloud-based PHI exposure. RDMA's uncertainty-flagging mechanism further reduces expert annotation burden while preserving agreement quality, supporting scalable rare disease documentation in clinical practice. Available at https://github.com/jhnwu3/RDMA.
title RDMA: Cost Effective Agent-Driven Rare Disease Mining from Electronic Health Records
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15867