\n<\/p>\n
From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency department doctors have long been popular heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up the scrubs?<\/p>\n
A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and death moments when people are first rushed to hospital.<\/p>\n
The results were described by independent experts as showing \u201ca genuine step forward\u201d in the clinical reasoning of AIs and came as part of trials that tested the responses of hundreds of doctors against an AI.<\/p>\n
The authors said the results, published in the journal Science, showed large language models (LLMs) \u201chave eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical reasoning\u201d.<\/p>\n
One experiment focused on 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read \u2013 typically including vital sign data, demographic information and a few sentences from a nurse about why the patient was there. The AI identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of cases, beating the human doctors, who were right only 50%-55% of the time.<\/p>\n
It showed the AIs\u2019 advantage was particularly pronounced in triage circumstances requiring rapid decisions with minimal information. The diagnosis accuracy of the AI \u2013 OpenAI\u2019s o1 reasoning model \u2013 rose to 82% when more detail was available, compared with the 70-79% accuracy achieved by the expert humans, though this difference was not statistically significant.<\/p>\n
It also outperformed a larger cohort of human doctors when asked to provide longer term treatment plans, such as providing antibiotics regimes or planning end-of-life processes. The AI and 46 doctors were asked to examine five clinical case studies and the computer made significantly better plans, scoring 89% compared with 34% for humans using conventional resources, such as search engines.<\/p>\n
But it is not curtains for emergency doctors yet, the researchers said. The study only tested humans against AIs looking at patient data that can be communicated via text. The AI\u2019s reading of signals, such as the patient\u2019s level of distress and their visual appearance, were not tested. That means the AI was performing more like a clinician producing a second opinion based on paperwork.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think our findings mean that AI replaces doctors,\u201d said Arjun Manrai, one of the lead authors of the study who heads an AI lab at Harvard Medical School. \u201cI think it does mean that we\u2019re witnessing a really profound change in technology that will reshape medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Adam Rodman, another lead author and a doctor at Boston\u2019s Beth Israel Deaconess medical centre where the study took place, said AI LLMs were among \u201cthe most impactful technologies in decades\u201d. Over the next decade, he said, AI would not replace physicians but join them in a new \u201ctriadic care model \u2026 the doctor, the patient, and an artificial intelligence system\u201d.<\/p>\n
In one case in the Harvard study, a patient presented with a blood clot to the lungs and worsening symptoms. Human doctors thought the anti-coagulants were failing, but the AI noticed something the humans did not: the patient\u2019s history of lupus meant this might be causing the inflammation of the lungs. The AI was proved correct.<\/p>\n
Nearly one in five US physicians are already using AI to assist diagnosis, according to research published last month. In the UK, 16% of doctors are using the tech daily and a further 15% weekly, with \u201cclinical decision-making\u201d being one of the most common uses, according to a recent Royal College of Physicians survey.<\/p>\n
The UK doctors\u2019 biggest concerns were AI error and liability risks. Billions are being invested in AI healthcare companies, but questions remain about the consequences of AI error.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is not a formal framework right now for accountability,\u201d said Rodman, who also stressed patients ultimately \u201cwant humans to guide them through life or death decisions [and] to guide them through challenging treatment decisions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Prof Ewen Harrison, co-director of the University of Edinburgh\u2019s centre for medical informatics, said the study was important and showed that \u201cthese systems are no longer just passing medical exams or solving artificial test cases. They are starting to look like useful second-opinion tools for clinicians, particularly when it is important to consider a wider range of possible diagnoses and avoid missing something important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Wei Xing, an assistant professor at the University of Sheffield\u2019s school of mathematical and physical sciences, said some of the other findings suggested doctors may unconsciously defer to the AI\u2019s answer rather than thinking independently.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis tendency could grow more significant as AI becomes more routinely used in clinical settings,\u201d he said. He also highlighted the lack of information about which patients the AI was worse at diagnosing and whether it struggled more with elderly patients or non-English speakers.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIt does not demonstrate that AI is safe for routine clinical use, nor that the public should turn to freely available AI tools as a substitute for medical advice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency department doctors have long been popular heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up the scrubs? A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1564,5815,366,1274,676,1443,23381,24386,2131],"class_list":{"0":"post-48939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-artificial","9":"tag-diagnoses","10":"tag-doctors","11":"tag-emergency","12":"tag-harvard","13":"tag-intelligence","14":"tag-outperforms","15":"tag-triage","16":"tag-trial"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}