Almanac - Retrieval-Augmented Language Models for Clinical Medicine.

BACKGROUND: Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive zero-shot capabilities, whereby they can use auxiliary data, without the availability of task-specific training examples, to complete a variety of natural language tasks, such as summarization, dialogue generation, and question answering. However, despite many promising applications of LLMs in clinical medicine, adoption of these models has been limited by their tendency to generate incorrect and sometimes even harmful statements. METHODS: We tasked a panel of eight board-certified clinicians and two health care practitioners with evaluating Almanac, an LLM framework augmented with retrieval capabilities from curated medical resources for medical guideline and treatment recommendations. The panel compared responses from Almanac and standard LLMs (ChatGPT-4, Bing, and Bard) versus a novel data set of 314 clinical questions spanning nine medical specialties. RESULTS: Almanac showed a significant improvement in performance compared with the standard LLMs across axes of factuality, completeness, user preference, and adversarial safety. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show the potential for LLMs with access to domain-specific corpora to be effective in clinical decision-making. The findings also underscore the importance of carefully testing LLMs before deployment to mitigate their shortcomings. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.).

Hypoxic-Ischemic Brain Injury in ECMO: Pathophysiology, Neuromonitoring, and Therapeutic Opportunities.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), in conjunction with its life-saving benefits, carries a significant risk of acute brain injury (ABI). Hypoxic-ischemic brain injury (HIBI) is one of the most common types of ABI in ECMO patients. Various risk factors, such as history of hypertension, high day 1 lactate level, low pH, cannulation technique, large peri-cannulation PaCO2 drop (∆PaCO2), and early low pulse pressure, have been associated with the development of HIBI in ECMO patients. The pathogenic mechanisms of HIBI in ECMO are complex and multifactorial, attributing to the underlying pathology requiring initiation of ECMO and the risk of HIBI associated with ECMO itself. HIBI is likely to occur in the peri-cannulation or peri-decannulation time secondary to underlying refractory cardiopulmonary failure before or after ECMO. Current therapeutics target pathological mechanisms, cerebral hypoxia and ischemia, by employing targeted temperature management in the case of extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (eCPR), and optimizing cerebral O2 saturations and cerebral perfusion. This review describes the pathophysiology, neuromonitoring, and therapeutic techniques to improve neurological outcomes in ECMO patients in order to prevent and minimize the morbidity of HIBI. Further studies aimed at standardizing the most relevant neuromonitoring techniques, optimizing cerebral perfusion, and minimizing the severity of HIBI once it occurs will improve long-term neurological outcomes in ECMO patients.