ChatGPT, a highly advanced AI chatbot, recently achieved a remarkable feat in passing the US medical licensing exam, making people asking about its potential to diagnose underlying health conditions. While computer-aided diagnosis has been attempted many times before, AI that draws from the entire internet for answers to questions opens unprecedented possibilities in augmenting medical diagnosis.
This begged the question of accuracy of ChatGPT’s assessment, so an American emergency medicine physician recently gave an account of how the AI was tasked with giving possible diagnoses of a young woman with lower abdominal pain. Although the ChatGPT came through with solutions such as appendicitis or ovarian cyst problems, it unfortunately missed the dangerous possibility of ectopic pregnancy.
However, after being informed of its error, ChatGPT was able to learn from the mistake and confidently proposed ectopic pregnancy when given the same question again. This goes to show AI’s capability to learn, making them standout from traditional computer-aided diagnosis algorithms. To further test its expanded capabilities, the AI was asked to diagnose a child with a sore throat and a red rash on the face. ChatGPT seemed to respond positively and gave appropriate suggestions, but missed the classic sign of scarlet fever. Adding “perioral sparing”, a medical term for the pale skin around the mouth when a person has scarlet fever, corrected the mistake, pointing to the feature of ChatGPT whereby it prefers technical language, a necessary condition for it to successfully pass its medical final exam.
Most intriguingly, ChatGPT showed a prudish response when asked to diagnose a male patient with pain while passing urine and a discharge after unprotected sexual intercourse. The AI was completely silent on the topic until the direct reference to sexual intercourse was removed. Subsequently, it gave the right solution, gonorrhoea. This goes to show the importance of openly talking about sexual health issues in the virtual realm, much like in reality.
At present, ChatGPT is not quite up to speed. It is necessary to inject more knowledge and to ensure that it can get over its coyness when dealing with topics that are often kept hush-hush. But amidst this, one thing is for certain: ChatGPT is already on its way as the future of medicine.
