BACKGROUND

Sepsis is a severe syndrome of organ dysfunction caused by infection; it has high heterogeneity and high in-hospital mortality, representing a grim clinical challenge for precision medicine in critical care.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to extract reported sepsis biomarkers to provide users with comprehensive biomedical information and integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineering to enhance the accuracy, stability, and interpretability of clinical decisions recommended by large language models (LLMs).

METHODS

To address the challenge, we established and updated the first knowledge-enhanced platform, MetaSepsisKnowHub, comprising 427 sepsis biomarkers and 423 studies, aiming to systematically collect and annotate sepsis biomarkers to guide personalized clinical decision-making in the diagnosis and treatment of human sepsis. We curated a tailored LLM framework incorporating RAG and prompt engineering and incorporated 2 performance evaluation scales: the System Usability Scale and the Net Promoter Score.

RESULTS

The overall quantitative ratings of expert-reviewed clinical recommendations based on RAG surpassed baseline responses generated by 4 LLMs and showed a statistically significant improvement in textual questions (GPT-4: mean 75.79, SD 7.11 vs mean 81.59, SD 9.87; P=.02; GPT-4o: mean 70.36, SD 7.63 vs mean 77.98, SD 13.26; P=.02; Qwen2.5-instruct: mean 77.08 SD 3.75 vs mean 85.46, SD 7.27; P<.001; and DeepSeek-R1: mean 77.67, SD 3.66 vs mean 86.42, SD 8.56; P<.001), but no significant statistical differences could be measured in clinical scenarios. The RAG assessment score comparing RAG-based responses and expert-provided benchmark answers illustrated prominent factual correctness, accuracy, and knowledge recall compared to the baseline responses. After use, the average the System Usability Scale score was 82.20 (SD 14.17) and the Net Promoter Score was 72, demonstrating high user satisfaction and loyalty.

CONCLUSIONS

We highlight the pioneering MetaSepsisKnowHub platform, and we show that combining MetaSepsisKnowHub with RAG can minimize limitations on precision and maximize the breadth of LLMs to shorten the bench-to-bedside distance, serving as a knowledge-enhanced paradigm for future application of artificial intelligence in critical care medicine.