Dr. AI will see you now: Study found ChatGPT can help diagnose disease

Dr. AI is here to treat you

What you probably already know: Researchers are scrambling to find myriad uses for ChatGPT and other similar large language model artificial intelligence systems that have the potential to analyze huge data sets and provide concise overviews. The medical community has a lot of unstructured data in need of analyzation.

Why? About 80% of the data in the medical field is unstructured, thereby making it difficult to analyze and use to develop treatments. A significant chunk of that data is doctor’s clinical notes, which are particularly difficult to analyze because they can range so much from physician to physician.

What it means: A new study, led by Yan Xie, Ph.D. and professor in the School of Public Health at UT Southwestern, looked at 700 sets of pathology notes for lung cancer patients and found that ChatGPT could be used to turn “oceans of free-text health care data into structured knowledge” that could then be used to inform decisions and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

What happens now? The study showed that the accuracy was about 89% based on reviews by human readers and, while helpful in extracting important and actionable information, still needs more oversight and review. Xie cautioned that researchers should proceed with caution. “Rigorous and continuous evaluation is very important,” she said.