Synthetic Evaluation of Sequential Clinical Inquiry
Most multimodal classifiers assume that all useful evidence is available upfront, whereas clinical inquiry is sequential. We present a synthetic evaluation framework separating objective multimodal inference from active inquiry. An objective model maps synthetic tongue, bilateral multipressure pulse, and acoustic observations to eight syndrome families.
A provenance-bearing Knowledge Core and training-only answer model support Bayesian narrowing over 33 fine terms using 25 typed questions, while seven safety questions remain outside the diagnostic posterior.
Weak shared symptom factors limit fine-term influence on objective phenotypes, and an objective-only probe tests leakage.
In a preregistered 600-case synthetic evaluation, objective family accuracy was 87.0%.
- Cost-sensitive expected information gain (cost-EIG) raised family accuracy to 95.5% and exact fine-term accuracy to 42.5%,
- versus 92.7% and 33.0% for an unoptimized fixed-order baseline.
Selective family accuracy reached 96.9% at 95.3% coverage.
However, cost-EIG asked more questions on average than fixed order (9.795 versus 9.352).
Missing-audio routing retained 94.0% family accuracy, and a workflow invariant enforced abstention when all objective modalities were absent.
Permuting fine-term answer likelihoods reduced family accuracy to 78.7%.
Five of six frozen checks passed, but the question-efficiency hypothesis failed.
Comparisons are descriptive because only aggregate, not paired case-level, outputs were retained.
These results establish a reproducible synthetic workflow, not clinical diagnostic or treatment validity.