RAG-based Architectures for Drug Side Effect Retrieval in LLMs

Abstract: Drug side effects are a major global health concern, necessitating advanced methods for their accurate detection and analysis. While LLMs offer promising conversational interfaces, their inherent limitations, including reliance on black-box training data, susceptibility to hallucinations, and lack of domain-specific knowledge, hinder their reliability in specialized fields like pharmacovigilance. To address this gap, we propose two architectures: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and GraphRAG, which integrate comprehensive drug side effect knowledge into a Llama 3 8B LLM. Through extensive evaluations on 19,520 drug side effect associations (covering 976 drugs and 3,851 side effect terms), our results demonstrate that GraphRAG achieves near-perfect accuracy in drug side effect retrieval. This framework offers a highly accurate and scalable solution, signifying a significant advancement in leveraging LLMs for critical pharmacovigilance applications.