Neurosymbolic Clinical Trial Matching via LLM-Driven Abduction and Logical Verification
About
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising path to automate Clinical Trial Matching (CTM), but still struggle with the deterministic verification required for complex eligibility criteria. Conversely, purely symbolic methods provide formal rigour but break down when faced with incomplete patient records and noisy clinical evidence. To bridge this gap, we investigate a hybrid framework for CTM combining LLMs with logical verification. In particular, we introduce an abductive neurosymbolic CTM framework ({\alpha}NeSy-CTM), which leverages the linguistic and world knowledge in LLMs to support reasoning over noisy and underspecified clinical text. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that {\alpha}NeSy-CTM substantially outperforms standalone LLM baselines, achieving up to 30% relative improvement over zero-shot baselines. In addition, our analyses confirm the impact of abductive reasoning on CTM, with {\alpha}NeSy-CTM exhibiting improved accuracy, specificity, and robustness over a non-abductive neurosymbolic setting. Furthermore, {\alpha}NeSy-CTM and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning prove highly complementary, highlighting the potential for a hybrid routing policy. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the impact of neurosymbolic methods for automating CTM, providing a path toward the next generation of auditable, LLM-driven clinical applications.