MRD-RAG: Enhancing Medical Diagnosis with Multi-Round Retrieval-Augmented Generation

In recent years, accurately and quickly deploying medical large language models (LLMs) has become a significant trend. Among these, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has garnered significant attention due to its features of rapid deployment and privacy protection. However, existing medical RAG frameworks still have shortcomings. Most existing medical RAG frameworks are designed for single-round question answering tasks and are not suitable for multi-round diagnostic dialogue. On the other hand, existing medical multi-round RAG frameworks do not consider the interconnections between potential diseases to inquire precisely like a doctor. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Round Diagnostic RAG (MRD-RAG) framework that mimics the doctor's diagnostic process. This RAG framework can analyze diagnosis information of potential diseases and accurately conduct multi-round diagnosis like a doctor. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed frameworks, we conduct experiments on two modern medical datasets and two traditional Chinese medicine datasets, with evaluations by GPT and human doctors on different methods. The results indicate that our RAG framework can significantly enhance the diagnostic performance of LLMs, highlighting the potential of our approach in medical diagnosis. The code and data can be found in our project website https://github.com/YixiangCh/MRD-RAG/tree/master.