With artificial intelligence seemingly working its way into every technology out there, one area where it's considered particularly promising is in helping doctors make medical diagnoses.
Dr. Michael of Massachusetts General Hospital is an early adopter who's helping with a form of AI that could someday change the way doctors access information.
Dr Michael specializes in invasive fungal infections in transplant patients. "Got a nice picture of mushrooms in my office," doctor says with a laugh. "I just really enjoy helping patients through, you know, pretty devastating mold and yeast infections."
Basically, it's Google for doctors — searching a huge database of articles written by experts in the field, who are all pulling from the latest research.
A visitor from Hawaii brings a mystery
A visitor from Hawaii brings a mystery
Wolters Kluwer Health, the company that makes Up To Date, is trying to incorporate AI doctors can have more of a conversation with the database
Software hallucinations are contraindicated
At this point, Wolters Kluwer Health is just sharing the AI-enhanced program in a beta form for testing. He says the company needs to make sure it's entirely reliable before it can be released.
He has seen the program make errors that people focused on large language model AI programs call hallucinations.
He once saw it cite a journal article in his area of expertise that he wasn't familiar with. "And I then looked to see if I could find the study in that journal. It didn't exist," He says. "So my next query to the large language model was, 'Did you make this up?' It said yes."
Once those kinds of kinks are worked out, AI is being seen across the medical world as having huge potential for helping doctors make diagnoses. It's already being used as a radiological tool, helping with CT scans and X-rays. Another program called Open Evidence, led by scientists at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, is using AI to read through the latest medical research studies and synthesize the information for users.
AI could do the prep work before a patient's appointment
Some doctors hope to use AI to comb through and summarize a patient's medical history before an appointment.
"It's a time-consuming and very haphazard process," says Dr. June-Ho Kim, who directs a program on primary care innovation at Ariadne Labs, which is a partnership of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "And you could see a large language model that's able to digest that and produce kind of natural language summaries of it being incredibly useful."
In some cases, Kim says, AI technology may also help primary care physicians care for patients without needing the assistance of specialists. "It will free up specialist time to focus on the more complex cases that they need to really [home] in on, rather than the ones that could be answered through a few questions," he says.
A study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in August tested out the diagnostic skills of the popular ChatGPT program. Researchers fed 36 clinical scenarios into ChatGPT and found that the AI program was 77% accurate when making final diagnoses. With more limited information based on patients' initial interactions with doctors, though, ChatGPT's diagnoses were just 60% accurate.
"It needs improvement," says he of Mass General Brigham, who was one of the paper's authors. "We've drilled down on specific parts of the clinical visit where it needs to improve before it's ready for prime time."
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