ChatDoctor: A Medical Chat Model Fine-tuned on LLaMA Model using Medical Domain Knowledge

Li Yunxiang, Li Zihan, Zhang Kai, Dan Ruilong, Zhang You

Recent large language models (LLMs) in the general domain, such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable success in following instructions and producing human-like responses. However, such language models have not been tailored to the medical domain, resulting in poor answer accuracy and inability to give plausible recommendations for medical diagnosis, medications, etc. To address this issue, we collected more than 700 diseases and their corresponding symptoms, required medical tests, and recommended medications, from which we generated 5K doctor-patient conversations. By fine-tuning LLMs using these tailored doctor-patient conversations, the resulting models emerge with great potential to understand patients' needs, provide informed advice, and offer valuable assistance in a variety of medical-related fields. The integration of these advanced language models into healthcare can revolutionize the way healthcare professionals and patients communicate, ultimately improving the overall efficiency and quality of patient care and outcomes. In addition, we made public all the source codes, datasets, and model weights to facilitate the further development of dialogue models in the medical field. The training data, codes, and weights of this project are available at: https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/ChatDoctor.