# DoctorRAG: Medical RAG Fusing Knowledge with Patient Analogy through Textual Gradients

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 29 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Medical and biomedical RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/medical-and-biomedical-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00267/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13178/) (2024)
- [Almanac: Retrieval-Augmented Language Models for Clinical Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01229/) (2023)
- [Medical Graph RAG: Towards Safe Medical Large Language Model via Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04187/) (2024)
- [DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09148/) (2022)
- [MedRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-augmented Generation with Knowledge Graph-Elicited Reasoning for Healthcare Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04413/) (2025)
- [Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine with Iterative Follow-up Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00727/) (2024)
- [BioRAG: A RAG-LLM Framework for Biological Question Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01107/) (2024)
- [TC-RAG:Turing-Complete RAG's Case study on Medical LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09199/) (2024)
- [RAG and RAU: A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Language Model in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19543/) (2024)
- [REALM: RAG-Driven Enhancement of Multimodal Electronic Health Records Analysis via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07016/) (2024)
- [Can Textual Gradient Work in Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19980/) (2025)
- [DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07094/) (2022)
- [The Multi-Round Diagnostic RAG Framework for Emulating Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07724/) (2025)
- [AutoMedPrompt: A New Framework for Optimizing LLM Medical Prompts Using Textual Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15944/) (2025)
- [Biomedical Knowledge Graph: A Survey of Domains, Tasks, and Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11632/) (2025)
- [Two-Layer Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Low-Resource Medical Question Answering Using Reddit Data: Proof-of-Concept Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19519/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Editing on Black-box Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08631/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MedReflect: Teaching Medical LLMs to Self-Improve via Reflective Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03687/) (2025)
- [One Patient, Many Contexts: Scaling Medical AI with Contextual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10157/) (2025)
- [Med-CoReasoner: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08267/) (2026)
- [StepGap: A Hybrid NLI-LLM Checker for Step-Level Evidence-Gap Detectionin Multi-Hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24733/) (2026)
- [Taking the PULSE of Medical Reasoning: Step-Level Retrieval Timing for Knowledge-Grounded Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20292/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing medical RAG systems mainly leverage knowledge from medical knowledge bases, neglecting the crucial role of experiential knowledge derived from similar patient cases -- a key component of human clinical reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose DoctorRAG, a RAG framework that emulates doctor-like reasoning by integrating both explicit clinical knowledge and implicit case-based experience. DoctorRAG enhances retrieval precision by first allocating conceptual tags for queries and knowledge sources, together with a hybrid retrieval mechanism from both relevant knowledge and patient. In addition, a Med-TextGrad module using multi-agent textual gradients is integrated to ensure that the final output adheres to the retrieved knowledge and patient query. Comprehensive experiments on multilingual, multitask datasets demonstrate that DoctorRAG significantly outperforms strong baseline RAG models and gains improvements from iterative refinements. Our approach generates more accurate, relevant, and comprehensive responses, taking a step towards more doctor-like medical reasoning systems.