ConTextual: Improving Clinical Text Summarization in LLMs with Context-preserving Token Filtering and Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Unstructured clinical data can serve as a unique and rich source of information that can meaningfully inform clinical practice. Extracting the most pertinent context from such data is critical for exploiting its true potential toward optimal and timely decision-making in patient care. While prior research has explored various methods for clinical text summarization, most prior studies either process all input tokens uniformly or rely on heuristic-based filters, which can overlook nuanced clinical cues and fail to prioritize information critical for decision-making. In this study, we propose Contextual, a novel framework that integrates a Context-Preserving Token Filtering method with a Domain-Specific Knowledge Graph (KG) for contextual augmentation. By preserving context-specific important tokens and enriching them with structured knowledge, ConTextual improves both linguistic coherence and clinical fidelity. Our extensive empirical evaluations on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that ConTextual consistently outperforms other baselines. Our proposed approach highlights the complementary role of token-level filtering and structured retrieval in enhancing both linguistic and clinical integrity, as well as offering a scalable solution for improving precision in clinical text generation.