Seoul Nationwide College Hospital has developed what may very well be the primary medical giant language mannequin in South Korea.
The challenge to develop the medical LLM started final yr in March. The SNUH analysis crew began by gathering 38 million scientific texts, together with hospital admissions, outpatients, surgical, prescription, and nursing data, and de-identified and anonymised them to create a base corpus for mannequin studying.
Then, initially of 2025, it developed department-specific information bases that have been later built-in into the LLM by means of retrieval-augmented technology (RAG). These information bases include native medical legal guidelines, paper abstracts, and therapy tips in Korean, in addition to medical terminology requirements and abbreviation dictionary.
The LLM was examined on questions from the Korean Medical Licensing Examination of the previous three years and scored 86.2%, which surpassed the typical takers’ rating of 79.7%. SNUH additionally mentioned the mannequin has proven excessive translation efficiency, processing 50,000-word texts concurrently.
The SNUH analysis crew will confirm the LLM’s efficiency and security for a yr earlier than it may be utilized to help scientific work and analysis. They additionally plan to increase its utility in varied medical fields and additional improve the mannequin’s medical knowledge processing functionality.
WHY IT MATTERS
Based on SNUH, present medical LLMs developed by tech giants, together with Google’s Med-PaLM 2 and Microsoft’s LLaVA-Med, are restricted to comprehending Korean medical texts, legal guidelines, and therapy tips. As these fashions are optimised within the Western context, these are discovered unreliable for Korean medical professionals. Therefore, the hospital researchers started creating a Korean medical LLM to fulfill the wants of native clinicians.
THE LARGER TREND
Late final yr, a startup backed by conglomerate SK Group claimed to introduce the primary LLM-based search platform particular to healthcare in South Korea. PhynX Lab’s Cheiron assists pharmacists and pharmaceutical trade researchers in retrieving related info by selecting up the person’s intent by means of pure language processing. It may possibly additionally self-reverify info and shortly generate high-quality solutions.
Korea College Anam Hospital can also be reportedly creating its personal LLM, which is predicted to be piloted this yr.
Asan Medical Heart has additionally utilised an LLM to create its voice-based scientific scribe, which is now used throughout its 16 departments.
In the meantime, SNUH is presently engaged on different AI initiatives to free clinicians from administrative work. This features a multimodal AI that may robotically generate affected person summaries, AI for enhancing insurance coverage declare processing, and AI that curates the most recent papers for researchers.
ON THE RECORD
“By means of the event of this Korean-style medical LLM, we’ve got opened a brand new chapter in medical innovation by maximising the work effectivity of medical employees and offering quicker and extra correct medical providers to sufferers,” mentioned SNUH president and CEO Dr Kim Younger-tae in an announcement.
