arXiv subjects

Muhammad Umar Afzal

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Umar Afzal.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MatchMiner-AI: Open-source, Privacy-preserving Cancer Clinical Trial Matching using Artificial Intelligence

Background: Clinical trials are essential to advancing cancer treatments, but fewer than 10% of adults with cancer enroll in therapeutic trials. Open-source AI trial matching tools could democratize access to trial options. Methods: We created MatchMiner-AI, co-developed with practicing clinical oncologists and trained on synthetic electronic health record (EHR) data. It uses open-weight LLMs to summarize patient histories from unstructured EHR text and extract target populations from trial eligibility documents. Embedding and re-ranking models were distilled to retrieve and rank trial and patient suggestions. Multifaceted evaluation was performed, including retrospective quantification of distillation fidelity; applying a closed-source LLM as judge of patient summarization and matching; and evaluation of candidate matches by oncologists. Results: Across retrospective evaluations of distillation fidelity, the pipeline outperformed a baseline text-embedding model, improving mean average precision (MAP) at 20 from 0.44 (95% CI 0.44-0.45) to 0.95 (95% CI 0.95-0.96) for trial-enrolled patients and from 0.38 (95% CI 0.37-0.38) to 0.94 (95% CI 0.93-0.94) for patients who received standard of care therapies. In a 50-patient sample selected for comparison between MatchMiner-AI and a rules-based tumor genomic trial matching algorithm, MatchMiner-AI retrieved trials for all patients, as opposed to 19 patients (38%) who had tumor genomic data available. Among those 19 patients, 80% of 256 trial suggestions retrieved by MatchMiner-AI were deemed reasonable considerations by a frontier LLM, vs 53% of 113 suggestions retrieved by the rules-based approach. Conclusion: MatchMiner-AI is an open-source, open-weights, clinical trial matching AI pipeline for oncology. Synthetic training data, model weights, inference tools, and demonstration frontends are publicly available.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

RECAP: Transparent Inference-Time Emotion Alignment for Medical Dialogue Systems

Large language models in healthcare often produce emotionally flat or opaque responses, failing to provide the transparent reasoning required for clinical trust. We present RECAP (Reflect-Extract-Calibrate-Align-Produce), an inference-time framework grounded in cognitive appraisal theory that decomposes patient input into auditable, appraisal-theoretic stages without retraining. Across multiple benchmarks and models from 8B to 120B parameters, RECAP improves alignment with human judgments, with gains inversely proportional to model scale. Intermediate outputs further reveal that models systematically underweight relational factors such as social support. In blinded evaluations, oncology fellows rated RECAP responses significantly higher than baselines with 76-88% win rates, demonstrating that principled prompting can enhance medical AI's emotional intelligence while maintaining the transparency required for clinical deployment.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating Medical LLMs by Levels of Autonomy: A Survey Moving from Benchmarks to Applications

Medical Large language models achieve strong scores on standard benchmarks; however, the transfer of those results to safe and reliable performance in clinical workflows remains a challenge. This survey reframes evaluation through a levels-of-autonomy lens (L0-L3), spanning informational tools, information transformation and aggregation, decision support, and supervised agents. We align existing benchmarks and metrics with the actions permitted at each level and their associated risks, making the evaluation targets explicit. This motivates a level-conditioned blueprint for selecting metrics, assembling evidence, and reporting claims, alongside directions that link evaluation to oversight. By centering autonomy, the survey moves the field beyond score-based claims toward credible, risk-aware evidence for real clinical use.

cs.CL↗