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Abstract - Systematic Evaluation of the Quality of Synthetic Clinical Notes Rephrased by LLMs at Million-Note Scale
Large language models (LLMs) can generate or synthesize clinical text for a wide range of applications, from improving clinical documentation to augmenting clinical text analytics. Yet evaluations typically focus on a narrow aspect -- such as similarity or utility comparisons -- even though these aspects are complementary and best viewed in parallel. In this study, we aim to conduct a systematic evaluation of LLM-generated clinical text, which includes intrinsic, extrinsic, and factuality evaluations of synthetic clinical notes rephrased from MIMIC databases at million-note scale. Our analysis demonstrates that synthetic notes preserve core clinical information and predictive utility for coarse-grained tasks despite substantial linguistic changes, but lose fine-grained details for task like ICD coding. We show this loss of detail can be substantially mitigated by rephrasing notes by chunks rather than by the whole note, but at the cost of reduced factual precision under incomplete context. Through fact-checking and error analysis, we further find that synthesis errors are dominated by misinterpretation of clinical context, alongside temporal confusion, measurement errors, and fabricated claims. Finally, we show that the synthetic notes -- despite their task-agnostic nature -- can effectively augment task-specific training for rare ICD codes.
大规模(百万级)合成临床笔记由大语言模型改写后的质量系统性评估 /
Systematic Evaluation of the Quality of Synthetic Clinical Notes Rephrased by LLMs at Million-Note Scale
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本研究在百万份临床笔记规模上,从内部质量、实用性和事实准确性三个维度系统评估了大语言模型改写合成的临床文本,发现这些文本保留了大粒度任务的临床信息和预测能力,但会丢失精细信息(如ICD编码),通过分块改写可缓解这一损失但会降低事实精度,最终证明了合成笔记虽不针对特定任务,却能有效增强罕见ICD编码的训练数据。