ChatGPT has drawn considerable attention from both the general public and domain experts with its remarkable text generation capabilities. This has subsequently led to the emergence of diverse applications in the field of biomedicine and health. In this work, we examine the diverse applications of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in biomedicine and health. Specifically we explore the areas of biomedical information retrieval, question answering, medical text summarization, information extraction, and medical education, and investigate whether LLMs possess the transformative power to revolutionize these tasks or whether the distinct complexities of biomedical domain presents unique challenges. Following an extensive literature survey, we find that significant advances have been made in the field of text generation tasks, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art methods. For other applications, the advances have been modest. Overall, LLMs have not yet revolutionized the biomedicine, but recent rapid progress indicates that such methods hold great potential to provide valuable means for accelerating discovery and improving health. We also find that the use of LLMs, like ChatGPT, in the fields of biomedicine and health entails various risks and challenges, including fabricated information in its generated responses, as well as legal and privacy concerns associated with sensitive patient data. We believe this first-of-its-kind survey can provide a comprehensive overview to biomedical researchers and healthcare practitioners on the opportunities and challenges associated with using ChatGPT and other LLMs for transforming biomedicine and health.

翻译：ChatGPT凭借其出色的文本生成能力，引起了公众与领域专家的广泛关注，并随之催生了生物医学与健康领域的多样化应用。本文探讨了大型语言模型（LLMs）（如ChatGPT）在生物医学与健康领域的多元化应用。具体而言，我们探索了生物医学信息检索、问答系统、医学文本摘要、信息抽取和医学教育等方向，并研究LLMs是否具备变革这些任务的转型力量，抑或生物医学领域的独特复杂性构成了特有挑战。通过广泛的文献调研，我们发现文本生成任务已取得显著进展，超越了此前的最优方法；而对于其他应用，进步则较为有限。总体而言，LLMs尚未彻底改变生物医学领域，但近期快速发展表明，此类方法具有巨大潜力，可为加速科学发现和改善健康提供宝贵工具。同时，我们注意到，在生物医学与健康领域使用ChatGPT等LLMs存在多种风险与挑战，包括其生成回复中的虚假信息，以及敏感患者数据相关的法律与隐私问题。我们认为，这项首次进行的综述可为生物医学研究人员和医疗从业者提供关于利用ChatGPT及其他LLMs变革生物医学与健康领域的机遇与挑战的全面概述。