Predicting Mental and Psychomotor Delay in Very Pre-term Infants using Large Language Models

Very preterm infants face a considerably higher risk of neurodevelopmental delays, making early diagnosis and timely intervention crucial for improving long-term outcomes. In this study, we utilized large language models (LLMs) to predict mental and psychomotor delays at 25 months using maternal and perinatal records combined with longitudinal features up to 22 months of age. The LLMs were employed to generate natural language descriptions for each infant, which were then used as input for a language model-based classifier to perform predictions. Our model achieved a 4.2% increase in AUCROC in mental delay prediction and 3.2% increase in psychomotor delay prediction 3 months before the 25-month assessment, compared to a random forest-based model for numerical tabular data only. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs as powerful tools for assessing the risk of neurodevelopmental delays in preterm infants.