Mitigating Ethical Issues for Large Language Models in Oncology: A Systematic Review

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility in oncology applications, such as cancer staging and survival analysis. Despite their potential, ethical concerns such as data privacy breaches, bias in training data, lack of transparency, and risks associated with erroneous outputs pose significant challenges to their adoption in high-stakes oncology settings. Therefore, we aim to explore the ethical challenges associated with LLM-based applications in oncology and evaluate emerging techniques designed to address these issues.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses framework, a systematic review was conducted to evaluate publications related to ethical issues of LLMs in oncology across eight academic databases (eg, PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase) between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2024.

The search retrieved 4,319 published articles, of which 65 publications were preserved and included in our analysis. We identified six prevalent ethical challenges in oncology, including trust, equity, privacy, transparency, nonmaleficence, and accountability. We then evaluated emerging technical solutions to mitigate ethical challenges and summarized evaluation metrics used to assess these solutions' effectiveness.

This review provides actionable recommendations for responsibly deploying LLMs in oncology, ensuring adherence to ethical guidelines, and fostering improved patient outcomes. By bridging technical and clinical perspectives, this review offers a foundational framework for advancing ethical artificial intelligence applications in oncology and highlights areas for future research.