ClaMPAPP

ClaMPAPP: Hybrid LLM-ML system uses language models as interfaces for pediatric appendicitis diagnosis

Researchers introduce ClaMPAPP, a hybrid clinical decision support system that uses an LLM solely for structured feature extraction from free-text clinical notes, then passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier for final diagnosis. Evaluated on two independent German pediatric appendicitis cohorts, ClaMPAPP outperformed end-to-end LLM baselines on diagnostic performance and showed greater robustness to narrative reordering. The work formalizes an 'LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor' design pattern that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference, offering a more auditable pathway for clinical AI.