Large Language Models for Medical OSCE Assessment: A Novel Approach to Transcript Analysis

Grading Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) is a time-consuming and expensive process, traditionally requiring extensive manual effort from human experts. In this study, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess skills related to medical student communication. We analyzed 2,027 video-recorded OSCE examinations from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW), spanning four years (2019-2022), and several different medical cases or "stations." Specifically, our focus was on evaluating students' ability to summarize patients' medical history: we targeted the rubric item 'did the student summarize the patients' medical history?' from the communication skills rubric. After transcribing speech audio captured by OSCE videos using Whisper-v3, we studied the performance of various LLM-based approaches for grading students on this summarization task based on their examination transcripts. Using various frontier-level open-source and proprietary LLMs, we evaluated different techniques such as zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval augmented generation, and multi-model ensemble methods. Our results show that frontier LLM models like GPT-4 achieved remarkable alignment with human graders, demonstrating a Cohen's kappa agreement of 0.88 and indicating strong potential for LLM-based OSCE grading to augment the current grading process. Open-source models also showed promising results, suggesting potential for widespread, cost-effective deployment. Further, we present a failure analysis identifying conditions where LLM grading may be less reliable in this context and recommend best practices for deploying LLMs in medical education settings.

Inverse Design of Metal-Organic Frameworks Using Quantum Natural Language Processing

In this study, we explore the potential of using quantum natural language processing (QNLP) to inverse design metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with targeted properties. Specifically, by analyzing 150 hypothetical MOF structures consisting of 10 metal nodes and 15 organic ligands, we categorize these structures into four distinct classes for pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake values. We then compare various QNLP models (i.e. the bag-of-words, DisCoCat (Distributional Compositional Categorical), and sequence-based models) to identify the most effective approach to process the MOF dataset. Using a classical simulator provided by the IBM Qiskit, the bag-of-words model is identified to be the optimum model, achieving validation accuracies of 85.7% and 86.7% for binary classification tasks on pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake, respectively. Further, we developed multi-class classification models tailored to the probabilistic nature of quantum circuits, with average test accuracies of 88.4% and 80.7% across different classes for pore volume and $H_{2}$ uptake datasets. Finally, the performance of generating MOF with target properties showed accuracies of 93.5% for pore volume and 89% for $H_{2}$ uptake, respectively. Although our investigation covers only a fraction of the vast MOF search space, it marks a promising first step towards using quantum computing for materials design, offering a new perspective through which to explore the complex landscape of MOFs.