Me LLaMA: Foundation Large Language Models for Medical Applications

Kavli Affiliate: Cheng Peng

| First 5 Authors: Qianqian Xie, Qingyu Chen, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Yan Hu

| Summary:

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and LLaMA
show promise in medical applications, yet challenges remain in medical language
comprehension. This study presents Me-LLaMA, a new medical LLM family based on
open-source LLaMA models, optimized for medical text analysis and diagnosis by
leveraging large-scale, domain-specific datasets. The Me-LLaMA family,
including foundation models Me-LLaMA 13/70B and their chat-enhanced versions,
was developed through continued pre-training and instruction tuning with 129B
tokens and 214K samples from biomedical and clinical sources. Training the 70B
models required over 100,000 A100 GPU hours. Me-LLaMA’s performance was
evaluated across six medical text analysis tasks using 12 benchmark datasets
and complex clinical case diagnosis, with automatic and human evaluations.
Results indicate Me-LLaMA outperforms LLaMA and other open-source medical LLMs
in zero-shot and supervised settings. Task-specific tuning further boosts
performance, surpassing ChatGPT on 7 of 8 datasets and GPT-4 on 5 of 8. For
complex clinical cases, Me-LLaMA achieves performance comparable to ChatGPT and
GPT-4. This work underscores the importance of domain-specific data in
developing medical LLMs and addresses the high computational costs involved in
training, highlighting a balance between pre-training and fine-tuning
strategies. Me-LLaMA models are now accessible under user agreements, providing
a valuable resource for advancing medical AI.

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