An Intelligent Virtual Standard Patient for Medical Students Training Based on Oral Knowledge Graph

Virtual standard patient (VSP) is in high demand for medical students' diagnosis ability training in an efficient manner. Different from the traditional conversation system in medical dialogue generation, VSP needs a novel conversation paradigm to act as the patient instead of the doctor. However, existing conversation techniques still have limited ability in terms of generation of symptoms exhibited by patients with the personalized and knowledge-centered expressions. To alleviate these problems, we propose to construct a novel oral knowledge graph, which sufficiently provides medical clues of the certain disease. Accordingly, the VSP could accurately interact with the dentists for their underlying intention and express the symptoms characters in a natural style. To efficiently retrieve the related disease clues, the symptoms descriptions of the oral diseases are encoded into the oral knowledge graph, which could well organize the disease-centered symptom entities and speaking styles. Moreover, to transfer the common sense knowledge from existing large scale of medical knowledge graph to the specific oral knowledge graph, a coupled pre-trained Bert models is further designed to learn the related medical knowledge from coarse-level to fine-level hierarchically. Finally, a series of well-designed personalized templates are proposed to generate plausible and realistic answers in condition of the certain disease. We also conduct extensive user studies to demonstrate that the VSP satisfies the medical students' diagnosis practice requirement in terms of naturalness, realism, and topic relevance.