LLMs and Their Applications in Medical Artificial Intelligence

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) is a cross-disciplinary field focused on developing advanced computing and AI technologies to benefit medicine and healthcare. Globally, medical AI has tremendous potential to support the United Nations’ sustainable development goals pertaining to health and well-being. In particular, large language models (LLMs) afford opportunities for positively disrupting medical AI-related research and practice. We present a research framework for LLMs in medical AI. Our framework considers the interplay between health and well-being goals, disease lifecycle stages, and the important emerging role of LLMs in medical AI processes related to various lifecycle stages. As part of our framework, we describe the LLM multiplex—important multimodal, multi-model, multicultural, and multi-responsibility considerations for LLMs in medical AI. We discuss how the five articles in the special issue relate to this framework and are helping us learn about the opportunities and challenges for LLMs in medical AI.