According to a study by investigators from Mass General Brigham, OpenAI’s ChatGPT can aid in the clinical decision-making process by selecting the right radiological imaging tests for breast cancer screening or breast pain. The study suggests that large language models like ChatGPT have the potential to assist decision-making by primary care doctors and referring providers in evaluating patients, resulting in more accurate imaging tests. The results were published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Associate Chair of Innovation and Commercialization at Mass General Brigham Radiology, Marc D. Succi, stated that ChatGPT’s abilities were impressive and sees it acting like a bridge between the referring healthcare professional and the expert radiologist. ChatGPT can act as a trained consultant to recommend the right imaging test at the point of care, without delay, which could reduce administrative time, streamline workflow, reduce burnout, and decrease patient confusion and wait times.
During the study, ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 were asked to determine which imaging tests to use for 21 fictitious patient scenarios involving the need for breast cancer screening or the reporting of breast pain using the appropriateness criteria. Researchers tested ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 by asking the AI in an open-ended way and by providing ChatGPT with a list of options. ChatGPT 4 outperformed 3.5, especially when given the available imaging options. When asked about breast cancer screenings and presented with multiple imaging options, ChatGPT 3.5 answered an average of 88.9% of prompts correctly, and ChatGPT 4 answered around 98.4% accurately.
Succi clarified that the study did not compare ChatGPT to existing radiologists since the existing gold standard is a set of guidelines from the American College of Radiology, which is the comparison they performed. He stated that the AI is not necessarily better than a doctor at choosing an imaging test but can be a great adjunct to optimize a doctor’s time on non-interpretive tasks. The ability of ChatGPT to support physicians on selecting suitable imaging tests can lead to better healthcare outcomes.
