(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – Artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT could soon be used to diagnose patients in emergency cases, according to a study that found the program’s diagnoses to be identical to or better than those of human doctors.
ChatGPT and doctors performed equally well in emergency diagnoses when given the same clinical information, according to the study by Steef Kurstjens, a clinical chemist with Jeroen Bosch Hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
“In the end, they were pretty comparable. And as they’re pretty comparable, [AI] might be helpful to speed up the process or enhance the amount of diagnoses at the emergency department,” the researcher said, as cited by HealthDay and Newsmax.
The experiment had two-doctor teams, and the AI program examine doctors’ notes and laboratory tests of 30 patients who received treatment at the hospital’s emergency department in March 2022. Both free and subscriber versions of ChatGPT were used.
The human doctor teams and the AI tools put together lists of their top five diagnoses for each patient. The exact diagnoses had been available as they were dealing with past cases.
The researchers found that the medical teams’ top five choices contained the correct diagnosis 87% of the time.
The subscriber version of ChapGPT achieved the same score of 87%, while the free version of the AI program contained the correct diagnosis 97% of the time.
“It’s a nice proof of concept and a nice way to show that the potential is there for using it like this,” Kurstjens said.
He added the potential for the real-world application of the AI tool in emergency medicine would be assessed in a follow-up clinical trial.
“There will need to be someone that will actually start comparing physicians using [AI] in their daily practice versus doctors not using it, and seeing if this affects the time the patient spends in the ED, the correct diagnosis, how long it takes to make the correct diagnosis,” the researcher elaborated.
According to Dr. Jessica Adkins Murphy, president of the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association, the Dutch study did demonstrate AI’s potential to boost emergency treatment.
However, she cautioned that many patients have complex and overlapping medical issues that artificial intelligence might have trouble analyzing.
“I just don’t quite think the study fully reflects the complexity of the patients that we have. And so though I’m excited to see what AI does, I think medicine is a lot more than choosing the most obvious five choices for a patient,” Murphy declared.
