RareAlert: Aligning heterogeneous large language model reasoning for early rare disease risk screening
About
Missed and delayed diagnosis remains a major challenge in rare disease care. At the initial clinical encounters, physicians assess rare disease risk using only limited information under high uncertainty. When high-risk patients are not recognised at this stage, targeted diagnostic testing is often not initiated, resulting in missed diagnosis. Existing primary care triage processes are structurally insufficient to reliably identify patients with rare diseases at initial clinical presentation and universal screening is needed to reduce diagnostic delay. Here we present RareAlert, an early screening system which predict patient-level rare disease risk from routinely available primary-visit information. RareAlert integrates reasoning generated by ten LLMs, calibrates and weights these signals using machine learning, and distils the aligned reasoning into a single locally deployable model. To develop and evaluate RareAlert, we curated RareBench, a real-world dataset of 158,666 cases covering 33 Orphanet disease categories and more than 7,000 rare conditions, including both rare and non-rare presentations. The results showed that rare disease identification can be reconceptualised as a universal uncertainty resolution process applied to the general patient population. On an independent test set, RareAlert, a Qwen3-4B based model trained with calibrated reasoning signals, achieved an AUC of 0.917, outperforming the best machine learning ensemble and all evaluated LLMs, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, o3-mini, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3-235B. These findings demonstrate the diversity in LLM medical reasoning and the effectiveness of aligning such reasoning in highly uncertain clinical tasks. By incorporating calibrated reasoning into a single model, RareAlert enables accurate, privacy-preserving, and scalable rare disease risk screening suitable for large-scale local deployment.