Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash 105 tok/s
Gemini 2.5 Pro 52 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 Medium 45 tok/s
GPT-5 High 34 tok/s Pro
GPT-4o 108 tok/s
GPT OSS 120B 473 tok/s Pro
Kimi K2 218 tok/s Pro
2000 character limit reached

Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications (2508.00669v1)

Published 1 Aug 2025 in cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, and cs.LG

Abstract: The proliferation of LLMs in medicine has enabled impressive capabilities, yet a critical gap remains in their ability to perform systematic, transparent, and verifiable reasoning, a cornerstone of clinical practice. This has catalyzed a shift from single-step answer generation to the development of LLMs explicitly designed for medical reasoning. This paper provides the first systematic review of this emerging field. We propose a taxonomy of reasoning enhancement techniques, categorized into training-time strategies (e.g., supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning) and test-time mechanisms (e.g., prompt engineering, multi-agent systems). We analyze how these techniques are applied across different data modalities (text, image, code) and in key clinical applications such as diagnosis, education, and treatment planning. Furthermore, we survey the evolution of evaluation benchmarks from simple accuracy metrics to sophisticated assessments of reasoning quality and visual interpretability. Based on an analysis of 60 seminal studies from 2022-2025, we conclude by identifying critical challenges, including the faithfulness-plausibility gap and the need for native multimodal reasoning, and outlining future directions toward building efficient, robust, and sociotechnically responsible medical AI.

List To Do Tasks Checklist Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Dice Question Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Follow-up Questions

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

X Twitter Logo Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
Youtube Logo Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Don't miss out on important new AI/ML research

See which papers are being discussed right now on X, Reddit, and more:

“Emergent Mind helps me see which AI papers have caught fire online.”

Philip

Philip

Creator, AI Explained on YouTube