Distinguishing Extraction Failures and Clinical Discordance with LLM Uncertainty on Radiology Reports

원문 초록

Large language models (LLMs) can structure clinical datasets, but extraction error must be distinguished from discordance in the underlying data. From a real-world cohort of 1{,}045 patients undergoing coronary CT angiography (CCTA), we evaluated whether LLM uncertainty during vessel-level coronary artery disease (CAD) stenosis extraction could identify extraction failure and clinical discordance. References were expert CCTA annotations (253 patients) and subsequent invasive coronary angiography (ICA; 729 patients). We quantify extraction failure as disagreement between stenosis severity in LLM extracted versus expert annotations, and clinical discordance as disagreement in stenosis severity between CCTA and subsequent ICA. Stenosis Margin, selected from ten candidate measures, was used to quantify LLM uncertainty, and generalized estimating equation logistic regression and AUC evaluated its association and incremental discrimination for each failure mode. LLM uncertainty was strongly associated with extraction failure (adjusted OR 4.15 [95% CI 2.57--6.69], $P<0.001$) and substantially improved discrimination beyond LLM-extracted CCTA stenosis severity alone (AUC 0.81 to 0.86; $\Delta$AUC $+0.06$ [$+0.03$, $+0.09$], $P=0.001$). In contrast, LLM uncertainty weakly associated with clinical discordance (adjusted OR 1.22 [1.04--1.43], Holm-adjusted $P=0.118$) but provided no incremental discrimination beyond LLM-extracted CCTA stenosis severity ($\Delta$AUC $+0.01$ [$-0.00$, $+0.02$], $P=0.245$). Moreover, extraction errors and clinical discordance showed little overlap, with 38 of 42 clinically discordant vessels (90%) having been extracted correctly. LLM uncertainty may identify extraction failures without identifying underlying clinical discordance, supporting failure attribution when evaluating LLM-derived clinical datasets.