# The use of large language models to enhance cancer clinical trial educational materials

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01955/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [ChatGPT Makes Medicine Easy to Swallow: An Exploratory Case Study on Simplified Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14882/) (2022)
- [Matching Patients to Clinical Trials with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15051/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Human Evaluation of Large Language Models in Healthcare Derived from Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02559/) (2024)
- [SummQA at MEDIQA-Chat 2023:In-Context Learning with GPT-4 for Medical Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17384/) (2023)
- [CliniDigest: A Case Study in Large Language Model Based Large-Scale Summarization of Clinical Trial Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14522/) (2023)
- [Overview of the BioLaySumm 2023 Shared Task on Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17332/) (2023)
- [Automatic Summarization of Doctor-Patient Encounter Dialogues Using Large Language Model through Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13089/) (2024)
- [Impact of Large Language Model Assistance on Patients Reading Clinical Notes: A Mixed-Methods Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09637/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cancer clinical trials often face challenges in recruitment and engagement due to a lack of participant-facing informational and educational resources. This study investigated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT4, in generating patient-friendly educational content from clinical trial informed consent forms. Using data from ClinicalTrials.gov, we employed zero-shot learning for creating trial summaries and one-shot learning for developing multiple-choice questions, evaluating their effectiveness through patient surveys and crowdsourced annotation. Results showed that GPT4-generated summaries were both readable and comprehensive, and may improve patients' understanding and interest in clinical trials. The multiple-choice questions demonstrated high accuracy and agreement with crowdsourced annotators. For both resource types, hallucinations were identified that require ongoing human oversight. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs "out-of-the-box" to support the generation of clinical trial education materials with minimal trial-specific engineering, but implementation with a human-in-the-loop is still needed to avoid misinformation risks.