Tugba Akinci D'Antonoli, Ali S Tejani, Bardia Khosravi, Christian Bluethgen, Felix Busch, Keno K Bressem, Lisa Christine Adams, Mana Moassefi, Shahriar Faghani, Judy Wawira Gichoya
Radiol Artif Intell. 2025 May 14:e240739. doi: 10.1148/ryai.240739. Online ahead of print.
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into health care offers tremendous opportunities to improve medical practice and patient care. Besides being susceptible to biases and threats common to all artificial intelligence systems, LLMs pose unique cybersecurity risks that must be carefully evaluated before these AI models are deployed in health care. LLMs can be exploited in several ways, such as malicious attacks, privacy breaches, and unauthorized manipulation of patient data. Moreover, malicious actors could use LLMs to infer sensitive patient information from training data. Furthermore, manipulated or poisoned data fed into these models could change their results in a way that is beneficial for the malicious actors. This report presents the cybersecurity challenges posed by LLMs in health care and provides strategies for mitigation. By implementing robust security measures and adhering to best practices during the model development, training, and deployment stages, stakeholders can help minimize these risks and protect patient privacy.