GlaucoRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Expert-Level Glaucoma Assessment.

Abstract

Purpose: Purpose: Accurate glaucoma assessment is challenging because of the complexity and chronic nature of the disease; therefore, there is a critical need for models that provide evidence-based, accurate assessment. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the capabilities of a glaucoma specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework (GlaucoRAG) that leverages a large language model (LLM) for diagnosing glaucoma and answering to glaucoma specific questions.

Design: Evaluation of diagnostic capabilities and knowledge of emerging technologies in glaucoma assessment.

Participants: Detailed case reports from 11 patients and 250 multiple choice questions from the Basic and Clinical Science Course (BCSC) Self-Assessment were used to test the LLM based GlaucoRAG. No human participants were involved.

Methods: We developed GlaucoRAG, a RAG framework leveraging GPT-4.5-PREVIEW integrated with the R2R platform for automated question answering in glaucoma. We created a glaucoma knowledge base comprising more than 1,800 peer-reviewed glaucoma articles, 15 guidelines and three glaucoma textbooks. The diagnostic performance was tested on case reports and multiple-choice questions. Model outputs were compared with the independent answers of three glaucoma specialists, DeepSeek-R1, and GPT-4.5-PREVIEW (without RAG). Quantitative performance was further assessed with the RAG Assessment (RAGAS) framework, reporting faithfulness, context precision, context recall, and answer relevancy.

Main outcome measures: The primary outcome measure was GlaucoRAG's diagnostic accuracy on patient case reports and percentage of correct responses to the BCSC Self-Assessment glaucoma items, compared with the performance of glaucoma specialists and two benchmark LLMs. Secondary outcomes included RAGAS sub scores.

Results: GlaucoRAG achieved an accuracy of 81.8% on glaucoma case reports, compared with 72.7% for GPT-4.5-PREVIEW and 63.7% for DeepSeek-R1. On glaucoma BCSC Self-Assessment questions, GlaucoRAG achieved 91.2% accuracy (228 / 250), whereas GPT-4.5-PREVIEW and DeepSeek-R1 attained 84.4% (211 / 250) and 76.0% (190 / 250), respectively. The RAGAS evaluation returned an answer relevancy of 91%, with 80% context recall, 70% faithfulness, and 59% context precision.

Conclusions: The glaucoma-specialized LLM, GlaucoRAG, showed encouraging performance in glaucoma assessment and may complement glaucoma research and clinical practice as well as question answering with glaucoma patients.