TriageAgent: Towards Better Multi-Agents Collaborations for Large Language Model-Based Clinical Triage

Meng Lu, Brandon Ho, Dennis Ren, Xuan Wang


Abstract
The global escalation in emergency department patient visits poses significant challenges to efficient clinical management, particularly in clinical triage. Traditionally managed by human professionals, clinical triage is susceptible to substantial variability and high workloads. Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising reasoning and understanding capabilities, directly applying them to clinical triage remains challenging due to the complex and dynamic nature of the clinical triage task. To address these issues, we introduce TriageAgent, a novel heterogeneous multi-agent framework designed to enhance collaborative decision-making in clinical triage. TriageAgent leverages LLMs for role-playing, incorporating self-confidence and early-stopping mechanisms in multi-round discussions to improve document reasoning and classification precision for triage tasks. In addition, TriageAgent employs the medical Emergency Severity Index (ESI) handbook through a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach to provide precise clinical knowledge and integrates both coarse- and fine-grained ESI-level predictions in the decision-making process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TriageAgent outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based methods on three clinical triage test sets. Furthermore, we have released the first public benchmark dataset for clinical triage with corresponding ESI levels and human expert performance for comparison.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.329
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5747–5764
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.329/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.329
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meng Lu, Brandon Ho, Dennis Ren, and Xuan Wang. 2024. TriageAgent: Towards Better Multi-Agents Collaborations for Large Language Model-Based Clinical Triage. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 5747–5764, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TriageAgent: Towards Better Multi-Agents Collaborations for Large Language Model-Based Clinical Triage (Lu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.329.pdf