Seoul Nationwide College Hospital builds Korean medical LLM

Seoul Nationwide College Hospital has developed what might be the primary medical giant language mannequin in South Korea.

The mission to develop the medical LLM started final 12 months in March. The SNUH analysis crew began by accumulating 38 million medical 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 way of retrieval-augmented era (RAG). These information bases encompass 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 typical 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 medical work and analysis. They additionally plan to broaden its software in varied medical fields and additional improve the mannequin’s medical knowledge processing functionality. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Based on SNUH, present 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 creating 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 business researchers in retrieving related data by choosing up the person’s intent by way of pure language processing. It may well additionally self-reverify data and shortly generate high-quality solutions.

Korea College Anam Hospital can be reportedly creating its personal LLM, which is anticipated to be piloted this 12 months.  

Asan Medical Middle has additionally utilised an LLM to create its voice-based medical scribe, which is now used throughout its 16 departments. 

In the meantime, SNUH is at present engaged on different AI tasks to free clinicians from administrative work. This features a multimodal AI that may mechanically generate affected person summaries, AI for enhancing insurance coverage declare processing, and AI that curates the newest papers for researchers. 

ON THE RECORD

“Via the event of this Korean-style medical LLM, we’ve got opened a brand new chapter in medical innovation by maximising the work effectivity of medical employees and offering quicker and extra correct medical companies to sufferers,” stated SNUH president and CEO Dr Kim Younger-tae in a press release.