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Large Language Model–Based Clinical Decision Support for Antibiotic Selection and Dose Recommendation in Hospitalized Patients With Pneumonia: Multicenter Retrospective Study

Yang L. Zhang, Li Li, Chunting Tan, Meng-Yuan Ji, Xin Tian, Xiangdong Mu, Jun Li, Yueming Gu et al.

JMIR Medical Informatics, 2026

331 participants

Abstract

Abstract Background Pneumonia is a common infectious disease, and antibiotic treatment in hospitalized patients must balance efficacy, safety, and resistance risk. However, antibiotic selection and dose adjustment still rely heavily on clinician experience. Although large language models (LLMs) are promising for clinical reasoning, their direct use for antibiotic selection and dose recommendation is limited by hallucinations and weak adherence to clinical constraints. Objective This study aimed to develop and externally validate a constrained LLM-based clinical decision support pipeline for antibiotic selection and dose recommendation in hospitalized patients with pneumonia. Methods We conducted a multicenter retrospective study using electronic health record narratives, antibiotic orders, and laboratory indicators of hepatic and renal function from 331 hospitalized patients with pneumonia from 2 hospitals in China. The development cohort included 233 patients, and the external validation cohort included 98 patients. The pipeline integrated dual-branch retrieval (similar-case vector retrieval plus guideline-based knowledge graph retrieval), clinician-defined rule constraints, and hybrid-context reasoning. DeepSeek-V3, GLM-4.6, and GPT-4o were evaluated using F1-score and Jaccard accuracy. Results On the internal test set, the full pipeline using DeepSeek-V3 achieved the best performance, with an F1-score of 0.8110 (95% CI 0.7371-0.8762) and Jaccard accuracy of 0.7624 (95% CI…

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