2023-09-13 18:37:17
The AI text program ChatGPT was used for the study with 30 simple medical cases. The diagnoses were surprisingly accurate, but ChatGPT also showed some weaknesses.
Although the AI text program ChatGPT is not specialized in medicine, it diagnoses patients in the emergency room as accurately as doctors, according to a study published on Wednesday. According to the Dutch study authors, the chatbot, which uses artificial intelligence (AI), even outperformed the work of doctors in some cases – but was still prone to errors.
For their study, the researchers examined 30 cases of patients who had been treated in a Dutch emergency room in the past year. They fed ChatGPT the anonymized patient data, lab tests, and doctors’ observations and asked the chatbot to make five possible diagnoses. They then compared this with the doctors’ diagnosis list and finally matched it with the correct diagnosis.
The doctors found the correct diagnosis in 87 percent of cases among the five suggestions, and with ChatGPT version 3.5 even in 97 percent of cases. “Simply put, this means that ChatGPT was able to suggest medical diagnoses, similar to what a human doctor would do,” said emergency physician Hidde ten Berg from Jeroen Bosch Hospital in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.
Few patients, clear symptoms
As in other areas, the chatbot also showed some weaknesses. Sometimes the chatbot’s reasoning was “medically implausible or contradictory,” the study said. This might lead to “misinformation or misdiagnosis” – with correspondingly serious consequences.
At the same time, scientists admitted that the number of cases examined was very low. In addition, only simple cases were examined in which the patient only complained regarding one main problem.
ChatGPT might provide doctors with ideas
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) congress in Barcelona. (APA/dpa)
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