Enabling Few-Shot Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis on Biomarker Data with Tabular LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kearney, Sophie, Yang, Shu, Wen, Zixuan, Hou, Bojian, Duong-Tran, Duy, Chen, Tianlong, Moore, Jason, Ritchie, Marylyn, Shen, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kearney, Sophie
Yang, Shu
Wen, Zixuan
Hou, Bojian
Duong-Tran, Duy
Chen, Tianlong
Moore, Jason
Ritchie, Marylyn
Shen, Li
author_facet Kearney, Sophie
Yang, Shu
Wen, Zixuan
Hou, Bojian
Duong-Tran, Duy
Chen, Tianlong
Moore, Jason
Ritchie, Marylyn
Shen, Li
contents Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a complex neurodegenerative disorder, requires analysis of heterogeneous biomarkers (e.g., neuroimaging, genetic risk factors, cognitive tests, and cerebrospinal fluid proteins) typically represented in a tabular format. With flexible few-shot reasoning, multimodal integration, and natural-language-based interpretability, large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities for prediction with structured biomedical data. We propose a novel framework called TAP-GPT, Tabular Alzheimer's Prediction GPT, that adapts TableGPT2, a multimodal tabular-specialized LLM originally developed for business intelligence tasks, for AD diagnosis using structured biomarker data with small sample sizes. Our approach constructs few-shot tabular prompts using in-context learning examples from structured biomedical data and finetunes TableGPT2 using the parameter-efficient qLoRA adaption for a clinical binary classification task of AD or cognitively normal (CN). The TAP-GPT framework harnesses the powerful tabular understanding ability of TableGPT2 and the encoded prior knowledge of LLMs to outperform more advanced general-purpose LLMs and a tabular foundation model (TFM) developed for prediction tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first application of LLMs to the prediction task using tabular biomarker data, paving the way for future LLM-driven multi-agent frameworks in biomedical informatics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enabling Few-Shot Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis on Biomarker Data with Tabular LLMs
Kearney, Sophie
Yang, Shu
Wen, Zixuan
Hou, Bojian
Duong-Tran, Duy
Chen, Tianlong
Moore, Jason
Ritchie, Marylyn
Shen, Li
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a complex neurodegenerative disorder, requires analysis of heterogeneous biomarkers (e.g., neuroimaging, genetic risk factors, cognitive tests, and cerebrospinal fluid proteins) typically represented in a tabular format. With flexible few-shot reasoning, multimodal integration, and natural-language-based interpretability, large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities for prediction with structured biomedical data. We propose a novel framework called TAP-GPT, Tabular Alzheimer's Prediction GPT, that adapts TableGPT2, a multimodal tabular-specialized LLM originally developed for business intelligence tasks, for AD diagnosis using structured biomarker data with small sample sizes. Our approach constructs few-shot tabular prompts using in-context learning examples from structured biomedical data and finetunes TableGPT2 using the parameter-efficient qLoRA adaption for a clinical binary classification task of AD or cognitively normal (CN). The TAP-GPT framework harnesses the powerful tabular understanding ability of TableGPT2 and the encoded prior knowledge of LLMs to outperform more advanced general-purpose LLMs and a tabular foundation model (TFM) developed for prediction tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first application of LLMs to the prediction task using tabular biomarker data, paving the way for future LLM-driven multi-agent frameworks in biomedical informatics.
title Enabling Few-Shot Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis on Biomarker Data with Tabular LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23227