MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning

arXiv cs.CL / 4/28/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that LLMs often fall short on clinical diagnostic reasoning because they lack sufficient domain-specific knowledge and adaptation beyond internal model knowledge.
  • It proposes MultiDx, a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that first generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning paths from multiple knowledge sources, including web search, SOAP-formatted cases, and a clinical case database.
  • MultiDx then integrates evidence from different perspectives using techniques such as matching, voting, and differential diagnosis to produce final diagnostic predictions.
  • The authors report that extensive experiments on two public benchmarks show the proposed approach is effective.

Abstract

Diagnostic prediction and clinical reasoning are critical tasks in healthcare applications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in commonsense reasoning, they still struggle with diagnostic reasoning due to limited domain knowledge. Existing approaches often rely on internal model knowledge or static knowledge bases, resulting in knowledge insufficiency and limited adaptability, which hinder their capacity to perform diagnostic reasoning. Moreover, these methods focus solely on the accuracy of final predictions, overlooking alignment with standard clinical reasoning trajectories. To this end, we propose MultiDx, a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that performs differential diagnosis by analyzing evidence collected from multiple knowledge sources. Specifically, it first generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning paths by leveraging knowledge from web search, SOAP-formatted case, and clinical case database. Then it integrates multi-perspective evidence through matching, voting, and differential diagnosis to generate the final prediction.~Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.