Validation of large language models for detecting pathologic complete response in breast cancer using population-based pathology reports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: The primary goal of this study is to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding and processing complex medical documentation. We chose to focus on the identification of pathologic complete response (pCR) in narrative pathology reports. This approach aims to contribute to the advancement of comprehensive reporting, health research, and public health surveillance, thereby enhancing patient care and breast cancer management strategies. METHODS: The study utilized two analytical pipelines, developed with open-source LLMs within the healthcare system's computing environment. First, we extracted embeddings from pathology reports using 15 different transformer-based models and then employed logistic regression on these embeddings to classify the presence or absence of pCR. Secondly, we fine-tuned the Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2) model by attaching a simple feed-forward neural network (FFNN) layer to improve the detection performance of pCR from pathology reports. RESULTS: In a cohort of 351 female breast cancer patients who underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and subsequent surgery between 2010 and 2017 in Calgary, the optimized method displayed a sensitivity of 95.3% (95%CI: 84.0-100.0%), a positive predictive value of 90.9% (95%CI: 76.5-100.0%), and an F1 score of 93.0% (95%CI: 83.7-100.0%). The results, achieved through diverse LLM integration, surpassed traditional machine learning models, underscoring the potential of LLMs in clinical pathology information extraction. CONCLUSIONS: The study successfully demonstrates the efficacy of LLMs in interpreting and processing digital pathology data, particularly for determining pCR in breast cancer patients post-NAC. The superior performance of LLM-based pipelines over traditional models highlights their significant potential in extracting and analyzing key clinical data from narrative reports. While promising, these findings highlight the need for future external validation to confirm the reliability and broader applicability of these methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".