Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician

Understand

A seminal paper published by Ledley and Lusted in 1959 introduced complex clinical diagnostic reasoning cases as the gold standard for the evaluation of expert medical computing systems, a standard that has held ever since.

• Here, we report the results of a physician evaluation of a large language model (LLM) on challenging clinical cases against a baseline of hundreds of physicians.
• We conduct five experiments to measure clinical reasoning across differential diagnosis generation, display of diagnostic reasoning, triage differential diagnosis, probabilistic reasoning, and management reasoning, all adjudicated by physician experts with validated psychometrics.
• We then report a real-world study comparing human expert and AI second opinions in randomly-selected patients in the emergency room of a major tertiary academic medical center in Boston, MA.