Large language models deconstruct the clinical intuition behind diagnosing autism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Efforts to use genome-wide assays or brain scans to diagnose autism have seen diminishing returns. Yet the clinical intuition of healthcare professionals, based on longstanding first-hand experience, remains the gold standard for diagnosis of autism. We leveraged deep learning to deconstruct and interrogate the logic of expert clinician intuition from clinical reports to inform our understanding of autism. After pre-training on hundreds of millions of general sentences, we finessed large language models (LLMs) on >4,000 free-form health records from healthcare professionals to distinguish confirmed versus suspected autism cases. By introducing an explainability strategy, our extended language model architecture could pin down the most salient single sentences in what drives clinical thinking toward correct diagnoses. Our framework flagged the most autism-critical DSM-5 criteria to be stereotyped repetitive behaviors, special interests, and perception-based behaviors, which challenges today's focus on deficits in social interplay, suggesting necessary revision of long-trusted diagnostic criteria in gold-standard instruments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".