Seoul Nationwide College Hospital has developed what could possibly be the primary medical giant language mannequin in South Korea.
The venture to develop the medical LLM started final 12 months in March. The SNUH analysis crew began by amassing 38 million scientific texts, together with hospital admissions, outpatients, surgical, prescription, and nursing data, and de-identified and anonymised them to create a base corpus for mannequin studying.
Then, initially of 2025, it developed department-specific information bases that had been later built-in into the LLM by retrieval-augmented era (RAG). These information bases include native medical legal guidelines, paper abstracts, and therapy tips 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 crew will confirm the LLM’s efficiency and security for a 12 months earlier than it may be utilized to help scientific work and analysis. They additionally plan to develop its software in varied medical fields and additional improve the mannequin’s medical information processing functionality.
WHY IT MATTERS
Based on SNUH, current 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 tips. 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 12 months, 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 choosing up the consumer’s intent by pure language processing. It will probably additionally self-reverify data and rapidly generate high-quality solutions.
Korea College Anam Hospital can also be reportedly growing its personal LLM, which is predicted to be piloted this 12 months.
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 the moment engaged on different AI tasks to free clinicians from administrative work. This features a multimodal AI that may robotically generate affected person summaries, AI for enhancing insurance coverage declare processing, and AI that curates the most recent papers for researchers.
ON THE RECORD
“By means of the event of this Korean-style medical LLM, we’ve opened a brand new chapter in medical innovation by maximising the work effectivity of medical employees and offering quicker and extra correct medical providers to sufferers,” stated SNUH president and CEO Dr Kim Younger-tae in an announcement.
