Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models for Healthcare: Methods and Applications provides valuable insights on Large Language Models in healthcare applications for researchers, academics, and practitioners. The book explains key concepts, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and the evolution of neural networks and transformer models. It then covers generative AI and LLMs for a wide spectrum of healthcare applications, including mental health, clinical decision support, interactive system design, and sensitive analysis. Readers will find this to be a valuable deep dive into the emergent intersection of LLMs and health care, with guidance into applications, technical and programming methods, and more. Although LLMs have shown some promising results in the healthcare sector, numerous challenges need to be addressed before they can be used in patient care. The two key issues with the adoption of LLMs regarding healthcare settings are reliability, transparency, interpretation of results and bias (data and algorithm) management. Unless properly and adequately validated, there may be incorrect medical information provided by the LLM-based systems, which can lead to misdiagnosis or hazardous treatment errors. At this point, LLMs have not only been used for decision making or documentation, they have also proven to be useful in patient engagement through QA systems, medical chatbots, and virtual healthcare.
