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Opportunities and challenges for ChatGPT and large language models in biomedicine and health
Open accessAbstract
ChatGPT has drawn considerable attention from both the general public and domain experts with its remarkable text generation capabilities. This has subsequently led to the emergence of diverse applications in the field of biomedicine and health. In this work, we examine the diverse applications of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in biomedicine and health. Specifically, we explore the areas of biomedical information retrieval, question answering, medical text summarization, information extraction and medical education and investigate whether LLMs possess the transformative power to revolutionize these tasks or whether the distinct complexities of biomedical domain presents unique challenges. Following an extensive literature survey, we find that significant advances have been made in the field of text generation tasks, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art methods. For other applications, the advances have been modest. Overall, LLMs have not yet revolutionized biomedicine, but recent rapid progress indicates that such methods hold great potential to provide valuable means for accelerating discovery and improving health. We also find that the use of LLMs, like ChatGPT, in the fields of biomedicine and health entails various risks and challenges, including fabricated information in its generated responses, as well as legal and privacy concerns associated with sensitive patient data. We believe this survey can provide a comprehensive and timely overview to biomedical researchers and healthcare practitioners on the opportunities and challenges associated with using ChatGPT and other LLMs for transforming biomedicine and health.
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“Prompt engineering improves chatbot performance by tailoring LLM output to be focused and helpful for a specific task.162,163”
From Large Language Models for Chatbot Health Advice Studies: A Systematic Review (2025) · cites this paper as [162]
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Cited by
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Large language models in healthcare and medical domain: A review
Nazi, Z. A., & Peng, W. (2024) · Informatics · doi:10.3390/informatics11030057 · Cited by 415
Current applications and challenges in large language models for patient care: a systematic review
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Lucas, H. C., Upperman, J. S., & Robinson, J. R. (2024) · Medical Education · doi:10.1111/medu.15402 · Cited by 287
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Jin, Q., Wang, Z., Floudas, C. S., Chen, F., Gong, C., Bracken-Clarke, D., Xue, E., Yang, Y., Sun, J., & Lu, Z. (2024) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-024-53081-z · Cited by 287
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Metadata
- Authors
- Tian, S., Jin, Q., Yeganova, L., Lai, P.-T., Zhu, Q., Chen, X., Yang, Y., Chen, Q., Kim, W., Comeau, D. C., Islamaj, R., Kapoor, A., Gao, X., & Lu, Z.
- Affiliations
- United States National Library of Medicine (US)
- King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (SA)
- Corresponding author
- Lu, Zhiyong
- ORCID
- Venue
- Briefings in Bioinformatics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2023-11-22
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1467-5463 (ISSN-L)
- 1477-4054
- PMC
- PMC10762511
- OpenAlex
- W4381587418
- Cited by
- 359
- References
- 132
- Citations by year
- 2026: 81 · 2025: 161 · 2024: 112 · 2023: 5
- FWCI
- 14.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Briefings in Bioinformatics (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
- Funders
- NIH Intramural Research Program
- National Library of Medicine
- National Institutes of Health (1K99LM014024)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Keywords
- ChatGPT, large language models, biomedical information retrieval, question answering, medical text summarization, information extraction, medical education, patient data privacy, legal issues, text generation
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