Back

Predicting Mental and Psychomotor Delay in Very Pre-term Infants using Large Language Models

Huang, Z.; Flory, M. J.; Kittler, P. M.; Phan, H. T.; Demirci, G. M.; Gordon, A. D.; Parab, S. M.; Tsai, C.-L.

2025-08-02 pediatrics
10.1101/2025.07.31.25332524 medRxiv
Show abstract

Very preterm infants face a considerably higher risk of neurodevelopmental delays, making early diagnosis and timely intervention crucial for improving long-term outcomes. In this study, we utilized large language models (LLMs) to predict mental and psychomotor delays at 25 months using maternal and perinatal records combined with longitudinal features up to 22 months of age. The LLMs were employed to generate natural language descriptions for each infant, which were then used as input for a language model-based classifier to perform predictions. Our model achieved a 4.2% increase in AUCROC in mental delay prediction and 3.2% increase in psychomotor delay prediction 3 months before the 25-month assessment, compared to a random forest-based model for numerical tabular data only. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs as powerful tools for assessing the risk of neurodevelopmental delays in preterm infants.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
34 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
34.8%
2
Scientific Reports
3102 papers in training set
Top 5%
10.7%
3
BioData Mining
15 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
8.9%
50% of probability mass above
4
PLOS Digital Health
91 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
5.1%
5
PLOS ONE
4510 papers in training set
Top 35%
4.2%
6
Healthcare
16 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
3.8%
7
Science Bulletin
22 papers in training set
Top 0.2%
2.0%
8
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
45 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
2.0%
9
Frontiers in Digital Health
20 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
1.8%
10
The Journal of Pediatrics
15 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
1.8%
11
Translational Psychiatry
219 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.6%
12
Pediatric Research
18 papers in training set
Top 0.2%
1.4%
13
Frontiers in Neuroscience
223 papers in training set
Top 6%
1.0%
14
Journal of Medical Internet Research
85 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.9%
15
Computers in Biology and Medicine
120 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.9%
16
Physiological Measurement
12 papers in training set
Top 0.3%
0.9%
17
BMC Bioinformatics
383 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
18
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
61 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.8%
19
Journal of the American Heart Association
119 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
20
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
39 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.8%
21
Nature Medicine
117 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
22
Journal of Personalized Medicine
28 papers in training set
Top 1%
0.8%
23
Research Synthesis Methods
20 papers in training set
Top 0.2%
0.8%
24
Schizophrenia
19 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
0.8%
25
NeuroImage: Clinical
132 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.5%
26
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2130 papers in training set
Top 48%
0.5%