Performance of Large Language Models in Answering Critical Care Medicine Questions

Abstract: LLMs have been tested on medical student-level questions, but their performance in specialized fields like Critical Care Medicine (CCM) is less explored. This study evaluated Meta-Llama 3.1 models (8B and 70B parameters) on 871 CCM questions. Llama3.1:70B outperformed 8B by 30%, with 60% average accuracy. Performance varied across domains, highest in Research (68.4%) and lowest in Renal (47.9%), highlighting the need for broader future work to improve models across various subspecialty domains.