Beyond Direct Diagnosis: LLM-based Multi-Specialist Agent Consultation
  for Automatic Diagnosis
Haochun Wang Sendong Zhao Zewen Qiang Nuwa Xi Bing Qin Ting Liu
Automatic diagnosis is a significant application of AI in healthcare, where
diagnoses are generated based on the symptom description of patients. Previous
works have approached this task directly by modeling the relationship between
the normalized symptoms and all possible diseases. However, in the clinical
diagnostic process, patients are initially consulted by a general practitioner
and, if necessary, referred to specialists in specific domains for a more
comprehensive evaluation. The final diagnosis often emerges from a
collaborative consultation among medical specialist groups. Recently, large
language models have shown impressive capabilities in natural language
understanding. In this study, we adopt tuning-free LLM-based agents as medical
practitioners and propose the Agent-derived Multi-Specialist Consultation
(AMSC) framework to model the diagnosis process in the real world by adaptively
fusing probability distributions of agents over potential diseases.
Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with
baselines. Notably, our approach requires significantly less parameter updating
and training time, enhancing efficiency and practical utility. Furthermore, we
delve into a novel perspective on the role of implicit symptoms within the
context of automatic diagnosis.