Enhancing LLM-based clinical reasoning in anesthesiology via graph-augmented retrieval and explainable generation
摘要
This study aims to enhance the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in anesthesiology decision support, leveraging a graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to improve analytical reasoning and deliver evidence-driven results.
MethodsBased on various clinical guidelines and textbooks, we constructed an Anesthesiology Knowledge Graph using UMLS as a reference ontology. We present a graph-based RAG framework, AnesGraph-RAG, which integrates pre-retrieval judgment, hybrid retrieval, and tailored Chain-of-Thought prompting to enhance reasoning performance. Its variant AnesGraph-RAG-UD further incorporates unfamiliarity-driven graph retrieval and structural querying to improve token efficiency.
ResultsThe constructed anesthesiology knowledge graph comprises 212313 entities and 529845 relations. Evaluation on the expert-annotated dataset confirms its high entity recall (82.19%) and precision (82.13%). Evaluations on the Anesthesiology Attending Physician Qualification Examination dataset indicate that our framework achieves superior performance over ChatGPT
In conclusion, by integrating structured domain knowledge with adaptive reasoning mechanisms, our graph-based RAG framework improves both the accuracy and interpretability of LLM responses in anesthesiology tasks. These results demonstrate the practical value of combining domain-specific knowledge graphs with LLMs in clinical decision support.