Knowledge Graph Augmented Large Language Models for Disease Prediction Open Access

Wang, Ruiyu (Spring 2026)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/5h73px613?locale=en
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Abstract

Electronic health records (EHRs) support strong clinical prediction but often provide coarse, post hoc explanations that are hard to use for patient-level decisions. We propose a knowledge graph (KG)–guided chain-of-thought (CoT) framework for visit-level disease prediction on MIMIC-III. We map ICD-9 codes to PrimeKG, mine disease-relevant nodes and paths, and use these paths to scaffold temporally consistent CoT explanations, retaining only samples whose conclusions match observed outcomes. We then fine-tune lightweight LLaMA-3.1-Instruct-8B and Gemma-7B models on two small cohorts (400 and 1,000 index visits) across ten PrimeKG-mapped diseases. Our models outperform strong classical baselines, reaching AUROC of 0.66–0.70 and macro-AUPR of 0.40–0.47. Without additional training, the models transfer zero-shot to the CRADLE cohort, improving accuracy from 0.40–0.51 to 0.72–0.77. Blinded clinicians consistently prefer KG-guided CoT for clarity, relevance, and correctness. Code is available at https://github.com/JonathanWry/KG-guided-LLM-pipeline.

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Introduction

Related Works

Method

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

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