Seoul Nationwide College Hospital has developed what could possibly be the primary medical giant language mannequin in South Korea.
The mission to develop the medical LLM started final yr in March. The SNUH analysis staff began by accumulating 38 million scientific texts, together with hospital admissions, outpatients, surgical, prescription, and nursing information, and de-identified and anonymised them to create a base corpus for mannequin studying.
Then, firstly of 2025, it developed department-specific information bases that had been later built-in into the LLM via retrieval-augmented era (RAG). These information bases encompass native medical legal guidelines, paper abstracts, and therapy pointers in Korean, in addition to medical terminology requirements and abbreviation dictionary.
The LLM was examined on questions from the Korean Medical Licensing Examination of the previous three years and scored 86.2%, which surpassed the common takers’ rating of 79.7%. SNUH additionally stated the mannequin has proven excessive translation efficiency, processing 50,000-word texts concurrently.
The SNUH analysis staff will confirm the LLM’s efficiency and security for a yr earlier than it may be utilized to help scientific work and analysis. They additionally plan to broaden its software in numerous medical fields and additional improve the mannequin’s medical information processing functionality.
WHY IT MATTERS
In keeping with SNUH, present medical LLMs developed by tech giants, together with Google’s Med-PaLM 2 and Microsoft’s LLaVA-Med, are restricted to comprehending Korean medical texts, legal guidelines, and therapy pointers. As these fashions are optimised within the Western context, these are discovered unreliable for Korean medical professionals. Therefore, the hospital researchers started growing a Korean medical LLM to fulfill the wants of native clinicians.
THE LARGER TREND
Late final yr, a startup backed by conglomerate SK Group claimed to introduce the primary LLM-based search platform particular to healthcare in South Korea. PhynX Lab’s Cheiron assists pharmacists and pharmaceutical trade researchers in retrieving related data by selecting up the consumer’s intent via pure language processing. It could additionally self-reverify data and shortly generate high-quality solutions.
Korea College Anam Hospital can also be reportedly growing its personal LLM, which is predicted to be piloted this yr.
Asan Medical Heart has additionally utilised an LLM to create its voice-based scientific scribe, which is now used throughout its 16 departments.
In the meantime, SNUH is at present engaged on different AI tasks to free clinicians from administrative work. This features a multimodal AI that may routinely generate affected person summaries, AI for enhancing insurance coverage declare processing, and AI that curates the most recent papers for researchers.
ON THE RECORD
“Via the event of this Korean-style medical LLM, now we have opened a brand new chapter in medical innovation by maximising the work effectivity of medical employees and offering quicker and extra correct medical companies to sufferers,” stated SNUH president and CEO Dr Kim Younger-tae in a press release.
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