Abstract
The reduced availability of medical datasets represents an important challenge in the development of predictive models for remote healthcare solutions, especially when the available data are imbalanced or difficult to extend through traditional methods. Small Language Models (SLMs) have become a promising alternative to Large Language Models (LLMs) for addressing these limitations due to their lower computational requirements and adaptability to specialized tasks. However, their performance remains highly dependent on the quality and representativeness of the available training data. In this paper, we propose a method for clinical data augmentation based on a fine-tuned Microsoft Phi-2 model that is used to generate synthetic instances, with the purpose of improving deep learning-based model for predicting remotely monitored vital signs. The Phi-2 model was adapted to the medical domain through supervised fine-tuning on the MedQuad dataset, through a Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA)-based method and by applying few-shot prompting techniques. The resulting model was used afterwards in the augmentation of a small-sized dataset, composed of vital sign values and labels associated with pathological and physiological states. The experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned SLMs improved the performance on medical domain, achieving higher scores for both lexical (ROUGE) and semantic (BERTScore) evaluation metrics compared to the pretrained model. Moreover, the fine-tuned SLM is effective for generating structured synthetic clinical data. When used for data augmentation, the generated dataset improved the performance of a LSTM predictive model, increasing the classification accuracy from 89.0% to 93.7% and showing consistent improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16460
