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[2602.17308] MedClarify: An information-seeking AI agent for medical diagnosis with case-specific follow-up questions
Summary
MedClarify is an AI agent designed to enhance medical diagnosis by generating case-specific follow-up questions, improving diagnostic accuracy through iterative reasoning.
Why It Matters
As AI continues to play a pivotal role in healthcare, MedClarify addresses the critical need for effective diagnostic tools that can handle uncertainty and complexity in patient cases. By improving the questioning process, it aims to reduce diagnostic errors significantly, which is vital for patient safety and treatment efficacy.
Key Takeaways
- MedClarify generates follow-up questions to aid diagnostic reasoning.
- It reduces diagnostic errors by approximately 27 percentage points compared to standard LLMs.
- The AI uses information-theoretic reasoning to select the most informative questions.
- Current medical LLMs often struggle with incomplete patient information.
- MedClarify promotes effective dialogues reflecting real-world clinical reasoning.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2602.17308 (cs) [Submitted on 19 Feb 2026] Title:MedClarify: An information-seeking AI agent for medical diagnosis with case-specific follow-up questions Authors:Hui Min Wong, Philip Heesen, Pascal Janetzky, Martin Bendszus, Stefan Feuerriegel View a PDF of the paper titled MedClarify: An information-seeking AI agent for medical diagnosis with case-specific follow-up questions, by Hui Min Wong and Philip Heesen and Pascal Janetzky and Martin Bendszus and Stefan Feuerriegel View PDF Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for diagnostic tasks in medicine. In clinical practice, the correct diagnosis can rarely be immediately inferred from the initial patient presentation alone. Rather, reaching a diagnosis often involves systematic history taking, during which clinicians reason over multiple potential conditions through iterative questioning to resolve uncertainty. This process requires considering differential diagnoses and actively excluding emergencies that demand immediate intervention. Yet, the ability of medical LLMs to generate informative follow-up questions and thus reason over differential diagnoses remains underexplored. Here, we introduce MedClarify, an AI agent for information-seeking that can generate follow-up questions for iterative reasoning to support diagnostic decision-making. Specifically, MedClarify computes a list of candidate diagnoses analogous to a differential diagnosis, and then ...
