Can Yang
Publications
A Decade-Scale Benchmark Evaluating LLMs' Clinical Practice Guidelines Detection and Adherence in Multi-turn Conversations
Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) play a pivotal role in ensuring evidence-based decision-making and improving patient outcomes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare scenarios, it is unclear to which extend LLMs could identify and adhere to CPGs during conversations. To address this gap, we introduce CPGBench, an automated framework benchmarking the clinical guideline detection and adherence capabilities of LLMs in multi-turn conversations. We collect 3,418 CPG documents from 9 countries/regions and 2 international organizations published in the last decade spanning across 24 specialties. From these documents, we extract 32,155 clinical recommendations with corresponding publication institute, date, country, specialty, recommendation strength, evidence level, etc. One multi-turn conversation is generated for each recommendation accordingly to evaluate the detection and adherence capabilities of 8 leading LLMs. We find that the 71.1%-89.6% recommendations can be correctly detected, while only 3.6%-29.7% corresponding titles can be correctly referenced, revealing the gap between knowing the guideline contents and where they come from. The adherence rates range from 21.8% to 63.2% in different models, indicating a large gap between knowing the guidelines and being able to apply them. To confirm the validity of our automatic analysis, we further conduct a comprehensive human evaluation involving 56 clinicians from different specialties. To our knowledge, CPGBench is the first benchmark systematically revealing which clinical recommendations LLMs fail to detect or adhere to during conversations. Given that each clinical recommendation may affect a large population and that clinical applications are inherently safety critical, addressing these gaps is crucial for the safe and responsible deployment of LLMs in real world clinical practice.
A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have enabled robust generalization in computational pathology through large-scale datasets and expansive architectures, but their substantial computational cost, particularly for gigapixel whole slide images, limits clinical accessibility and scalability. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly foundational framework designed to mitigate model over-parameterization and patch level redundancy. LitePath integrates LiteFM, a compact model distilled from three large PFMs (Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2) using 190 million patches, and the Adaptive Patch Selector (APS), a lightweight component for task-specific patch selection. The framework reduces model parameters by 28x and lowers FLOPs by 403.5x relative to Virchow2, enabling deployment on low-power edge hardware such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. On this device, LitePath processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x lower than Virchow2 on an RTX3090 GPU. We validated accuracy using 37 cohorts across four organs and 26 tasks (26 internal, 9 external, and 2 prospective), comprising 15,672 slides from 9,808 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. LitePath ranks second among 19 evaluated models and outperforms larger models including H-Optimus-1, mSTAR, UNI2 and GPFM, while retaining 99.71% of the AUC of Virchow2 on average. To quantify the balance between accuracy and efficiency, we propose the Deployability Score (D-Score), defined as the weighted geometric mean of normalized AUC and normalized FLOP, where LitePath achieves the highest value, surpassing Virchow2 by 10.64%. These results demonstrate that LitePath enables rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art PFMs and reducing the carbon footprint of AI deployment.