ImmunoFOMO: Are Language Models missing what oncologists see?

Abstract

Language models (LMs) capabilities have grown with a fast pace over the past decade leading researchers in various disciplines, such as biomedical research, to increasingly explore the utility of LMs in their day-to-day applications. Domain specific language models have already been in use for biomedical natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recently however, the interest has grown towards medical language models and their understanding capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the medical conceptual grounding of various language models against expert clinicians for identification of hallmarks of immunotherapy in breast cancer abstracts. Our results show that pre-trained language models have potential to outperform large language models in identifying very specific (low-level) concepts.