Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Study Claims Google AI Outperforms Human Doctors in Diagnostics and Empathy

Why should doctors not become unemployed by AI or why import doctors from remote poor countries, where they are needed?

Your AI doctor will see you now day and night, seven days a week! 😊

"... One challenge facing the developers was a shortage of real-world medical conversations available to use as training data ..." Really! There should be tons of videos of such conversations available.

"... “To our knowledge, this is the first time that a conversational AI system has ever been designed optimally for diagnostic dialogue and taking the clinical history,” ..."

From the abstract:
"At the heart of medicine lies the physician-patient dialogue, where skillful history-taking paves the way for accurate diagnosis, effective management, and enduring trust. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems capable of diagnostic dialogue could increase accessibility, consistency, and quality of care. However, approximating clinicians' expertise is an outstanding grand challenge. Here, we introduce AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer), a Large Language Model (LLM) based AI system optimized for diagnostic dialogue.
AMIE uses a novel self-play based simulated environment with automated feedback mechanisms for scaling learning across diverse disease conditions, specialties, and contexts. We designed a framework for evaluating clinically-meaningful axes of performance including history-taking, diagnostic accuracy, management reasoning, communication skills, and empathy. We compared AMIE's performance to that of primary care physicians (PCPs) in a randomized, double-blind crossover study of text-based consultations with validated patient actors in the style of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). The study included 149 case scenarios from clinical providers in Canada, the UK, and India, 20 PCPs for comparison with AMIE, and evaluations by specialist physicians and patient actors. AMIE demonstrated greater diagnostic accuracy and superior performance on 28 of 32 axes according to specialist physicians and 24 of 26 axes according to patient actors. Our research has several limitations and should be interpreted with appropriate caution. Clinicians were limited to unfamiliar synchronous text-chat which permits large-scale LLM-patient interactions but is not representative of usual clinical practice. While further research is required before AMIE could be translated to real-world settings, the results represent a milestone towards conversational diagnostic AI."

Study Claims Google AI Outperforms Human Doctors in Diagnostics and Empathy A new study claims that Google’s advanced AI chatbot has demonstrated superior diagnostic abilities and empathy compared to board-certified primary-care physicians in simulated medical scenarios.

Google AI has better bedside manner than human doctors — and makes better diagnoses (Nature news) Researchers say their artificial-intelligence system could help to democratize medicine.


Figure 1: Overview of contributions. AMIE is a conversational medical AI optimised for diagnostic dialogue



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