Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2407.21053

Knowledge Models for Cancer Clinical Practice Guidelines : Construction, Management and Usage in Question Answering

Abstract

An automated knowledge modeling algorithm for Cancer Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) extracts the knowledge contained in the CPG documents and transforms it into a programmatically interactable, easy-to-update structured model with minimal human intervention. The existing automated algorithms have minimal scope and cannot handle the varying complexity of the knowledge content in the CPGs for different cancer types. This work proposes an improved automated knowledge modeling algorithm to create knowledge models from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) CPGs in Oncology for different cancer types. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated with NCCN CPGs for four different cancer types. We also proposed an algorithm to compare the knowledge models for different versions of a guideline to discover the specific changes introduced in the treatment protocol of a new version. We created a question-answering (Q&A) framework with the guideline knowledge models as the augmented knowledge base to study our ability to query the knowledge models. We compiled a set of 32 question-answer pairs derived from two reliable data sources for the treatment of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) to evaluate the Q&A framework. The framework was evaluated against the question-answer pairs from one data source, and it can generate the answers with 54.5% accuracy from the treatment algorithm and 81.8% accuracy from the discussion part of the NCCN NSCLC guideline knowledge model.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Pralaypati Ta, Bhumika Gupta, Arihant Jain, Sneha Sree C, Keerthi Ram, Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam. 2024-07-23. Knowledge Models for Cancer Clinical Practice Guidelines : Construction, Management and Usage in Question Answering. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21053

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning tasks, which leads to the development of increasingly large models. However, scaling up model sizes results in significantly higher computational costs and energy consumption, which makes these models impractical for academic researchers and businesses with limited resources. At the same time, Small Models (SMs) are frequently used in practical settings, although their significance is currently underestimated. This raises important questions about the role of small models in the era of LLMs, a topic that has received limited attention in prior surveys. In this work, we systematically examine the relationship between LLMs and SMs from two key perspectives: Collaboration and Competition (or Complementarity). We hope this survey provides valuable insights for practitioners, fostering a deeper understanding of the contribution of small models and promoting more efficient use of computational resources.

cs.CL

SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.

cs.CL

A Course Intelligence Platform for Higher Education: Lessons from AI-Assisted Course Evaluation

The rapid adoption of generative AI has created new opportunities for teaching, learning, and quality assurance. Existing applications, however, remain largely student-facing, with comparatively limited attention to institution-level needs. This paper presents a course intelligence platform deployed across more than 100 universities and serving over 10,000 instructors in China. By linking competency requirements, knowledge structures, teaching activities, and assessment evidence, it establishes a shared foundation for knowledge organization, instructional design, learning assessment, and quality evaluation. The course evaluation module is examined as a representative institution-facing application of the platform, which integrates national evaluation standards, structured educational evidence, customized prompting strategies, and domain-adapted LLMs to generate quantitative scores and qualitative feedback. A case study involving 100 authentic university courses is conducted to evaluate its alignment with expert judgments and the interpretability of its outputs. Statistical analyses show substantial agreement between AI-generated assessments and expert ratings, while qualitative results highlight the credibility of the feedback. The findings further suggest that AI-assisted evaluation requires not only capable models but also structured domain knowledge and transparent criteria. In this context, human ratings should be treated as an informative reference rather than an error-free gold standard, and the objective is to achieve consistent, interpretable, and defensible judgments instead of merely replicating expert scores.

cs.CL