Data Foundations for Medical AI: Provenance, Reliability and Limitations of Russian Clinical NLP Resources

Russian-language resources for medical natural language processing (NLP) are expanding rapidly; however, their fragmentation, uneven curation, and limited clinical reliability hinder the development of safe machine learning systems for prognosis, prevention, and precision medicine. We provide the first systematic survey of Russian medical NLP datasets and analyze their suitability for clinically meaningful tasks as defined by the MedHELM taxonomy. We additionally perform expert clinical validation of three representative public corpora—RuMedPrimeData (real outpatient notes), MedSyn (synthetic clinical notes), and RuMedNLI (translated natural language inference)—assessing clinical plausibility, diagnosis accuracy, and logical consistency. Experts identified substantial reliability issues: across randomly sampled subsets of each corpus, only approximately 20% of RuMedPrimeData records, fewer than 15% of MedSyn records, and approximately 55% of RuMedNLI pairs met essential quality criteria, which can hinder downstream ML systems built on these data. To support robust applications—ranging from medical chatbots and triage assistants to predictive and preventive models—we outline practical requirements for high-quality datasets: coordinated, expert-validated, machine-readable corpora aligned with clinical guidelines and insurance logic, standardized de-identification, and transparent provenance. Strengthening these data foundations will enable the development of reliable, reproducible, and clinically relevant AI systems suitable for real-world healthcare applications.