medIKAL: Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis on EMRs

Abstract

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), while integral to modern healthcare, present challenges for clinical reasoning and diagnosis due to their complexity and information redundancy. To address this, we proposed medIKAL (Integrating Knowledge Graphs as Assistants of LLMs), a framework that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance diagnostic capabilities. medIKAL assigns weighted importance to entities in medical records based on their type, enabling precise localization of candidate diseases within KGs. It innovatively employs a residual network-like approach, allowing initial diagnosis by the LLM to be merged into KG search results. Through a path-based reranking algorithm and a fill-in-the-blank style prompt template, it further refined the diagnostic process. We validated medIKAL's effectiveness through extensive experiments on a newly introduced open-sourced Chinese EMR dataset, demonstrating its potential to improve clinical diagnosis in real-world settings.