Artificial Intelligence Learns to Make Sense of Childhood Cancer Survivors’ Health Care Needs
Artificial Intelligence Learns to Make Sense of Childhood Cancer Survivors’ Health Care Needs
Publish Date: 2026-03-27 20:00:00
Source Domain: www.newswise.com
Newswise — (MEMPHIS, Tenn. – March 26, 2026) Artificial intelligence (AI) could help physicians determine if survivors of childhood cancer need extra support — and the more information included in AI prompting, the better its performance. This finding, published today in Communications Medicine by scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, may guide future integration of AI into clinical workflows.
The scientists observed how well large language models, a type of AI, could analyze interviews with young survivors and their caregivers to detect multiple symptoms causing severe disruptions in their daily lives. By comparing different prompting approaches, the researchers found that more complex prompts, which provided additional information to the models, performed the best. The results suggest that future efforts to leverage AI to improve survivors’ care should consider these sophisticated prompting strategies over simpler ones.
“About 40%-60% of a clinical encounter is a patient talking to their physician about symptoms and related health experiences,” said corresponding author I-Chan Huang, PhD, St. Jude Department of Epidemiology & Cancer Control. “We have provided a proof of concept that large language models could help analyze that underutilized conversational data to detect symptom severity and its functional impact and assist physician decision-making to provide better care to survivors.”
Comparing prompting strategies for survivorship
Children who have cancer are treated during a critical time in their development, which can have a ripple effect later in life. Cancer- and treatment-related effects can occur long after the initial disease is cured. However, identifying which survivors have symptoms severe enough to need extra, targeted support is difficult for physicians. Much of the data that informs that identification exists in transcripts of conversations and answers to open-ended questions in surveys that…
