Great study: ChatGPT is as good as emergency room doctors at diagnosis

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Although the AI ​​text program ChatGPT is not specialized in medicine, it diagnoses emergency room patients at least as correctly as doctors, according to a study published on Wednesday. According to the Dutch authors of the study, the chatbot, which uses artificial intelligence (AI), in some cases even outperformed the work of doctors – but was still prone to errors.

For their study, the researchers examined thirty cases of patients who had been treated in a Dutch emergency department in the past year. They fed ChatGPT with anonymized patient data, lab tests and doctor observations and asked the chatbot to make five possible diagnoses. They then compared this with the doctors’ diagnosis list and ultimately linked it to the correct diagnosis.

AI was correct 10 percent more often than human diagnoses

The doctors found the correct diagnosis among the five suggestions in 87 percent of the cases, and with ChatGPT version 3.5 even in 97 percent of the cases. “Simply put, this means that ChatGPT could propose medical diagnoses, similar to how a human doctor would do it,” says emergency physician Hidde ten Berg of the Jeroen Bosch Hospital in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

As in other areas, the chatbot also showed some weaknesses. Sometimes the chatbot’s reasoning was “medically unlikely or contradictory,” the study said. This could lead to “wrong information or misdiagnosis” – with correspondingly serious consequences.

At the same time, scientists admitted that the number of cases studied was very low. In addition, only simple cases where the patient complained of only one main problem were examined.

AI could help emergency room doctors

The research does not mean that computers will one day be able to take over emergency room management, co-author Steef Kurstjens told the AFP news agency. But artificial intelligence could support doctors under pressure with diagnoses – for example by ‘providing ideas that the doctor had not thought of’. AI has the “potential to save time and thus reduce waiting times in emergency rooms,” said ten Berg.

The study was published in the journal “Annals of Emergency Medicine”. Their results will be presented next week at the European Society for Emergency Medicine (Eusem) conference in Barcelona. (AFP)

Source: Blick