Fine-Tuning LLMs on Small Medical Datasets: Text Classification and Normalization Effectiveness on Cardiology reports and Discharge records

We investigate the effectiveness of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on small medical datasets for text classification and named entity recognition tasks. Using a German cardiology report dataset and the i2b2 Smoking Challenge dataset, we demonstrate that fine-tuning small LLMs locally on limited training data can improve performance achieving comparable results to larger models. Our experiments show that fine-tuning improves performance on both tasks, with notable gains observed with as few as 200-300 training examples. Overall, the study highlights the potential of task-specific fine-tuning of LLMs for automating clinical workflows and efficiently extracting structured data from unstructured medical text.

@article{losch2025_2503.21349,
  title={ Fine-Tuning LLMs on Small Medical Datasets: Text Classification and Normalization Effectiveness on Cardiology reports and Discharge records },
  author={ Noah Losch and Lucas Plagwitz and Antonius Büscher and Julian Varghese },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.21349},
  year={ 2025 }
}