SIFTING: A Novel LLM-Based Framework for Structured and Transparent Information Extraction from Clinical Free-Text Reports, with Application to Tumor Staging in Lung Cancer

Background: Large language models (LLMs) show promise for extracting information from clinical free-text documents, but their outputs are often unstructured and lack traceability, complicating validation and adoption in clinical workflows. In this work we introduce SIFTING, an LLM-based framework de