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OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

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Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#51
post #44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But liability and ethics cannot be put aside. If treatments were free of cost and perfectly address problems, then a correct diagnosis would always lead to the optimal patient outcome. In that scenario, AI diagnosis will be like code generation and go asymptotic to perfection as models improve. But a doctor's job in the real world today is to navigate a total mess of uncertainty: about the expected outcome of treatme…

Isn't that conflating diagnosis and treatment plan?

Sure, but my anecdotal experience is that doctors do this regularly in real life, especially when choosing to diagnose or ignore problems that are unlikely to kill an aging patient before some other larger issue does.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#52

> "An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read" This is handicapping the human doctors abilities. There is a lot more information a human doctor can gather even with a brief observation of the patient.

On the other hand,

> there are few things as dangerous as an expert with access to open-ended data that can be interpreted wildly, like a clinical interview.

https://entropicthoughts.com/arithmetic-models-better-than-y...

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

Technology is on a generational 10,000 year run of non-stop successfully solving human problems.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

I would personally vastly, vastly prefer to go to a robot doctor, who diagnoses, treats and nurses me. What exactly do I need from a human here? Except of course being the one making the system.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#55
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

> What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it. Being a human when a patient is experiencing what is potentially one of the worst moments of their life. AI could be a tool…

On the other hand, health care is not scaling to meet the growing demand of societies (look at the growing wait queues for access to basic medical attention in most Western nations). The cause of this is a separate topic and something that deserves more attention than it currently gets, but I digress. If AI can fill the gap by making 24/7/265 instant diagnosis and early intervention a reality, with it then bringing a human into the loop when actually necessary... I think that is something worth pursuing as a force multiplier.

We're clearly not there yet, but it is inevitible that these models will eventually exceed human capability in identifying what an issue is, understanding all of the health conditions the patient has, and recommending a treatment plan that results in the best outcome.

You may not want to receive a cancer diagnosis from an AI doctor... but if an AI doctor could automatically detect cancer (before you even displayed symptoms) and get you treated at a far earlier date than a human doctor, you would probably change your mind.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#56
post #14
post #9

I’d love to see a follow to that radiologist evaluation, where it failed so miserably on the thing it was supposed to be the best at that now there’s a shortage of radiologists.

Not an expert but what I’ve heard is that AI-based radiology analysis has brought down prices so much that there’s been a huge increase in demand, which has led to employee shortages.

Did you hear this in the US or Europe?

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#57
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. Nobody said that though? If the current trajectory continues and if advancements are made regarding automated data collection about patients and if those advancements are adopted in the clinic then presumably specialized medical models will exceed human performance at the task of diagnosis at some point in the fut…

Until medical models can contrive of unique diagnosis, this will not be true and cannot be true. Medical models can absolutely get better at recognizing the patterns of diagnosis that doctors have already been diagnosing - which means they will also amplify misdiagnosis that aren't corrected for via cohort average. This is easy to see a large problem with: you end up with a pseudo-eugenics medical system that can't h…

The pitfall you describe is not inconsistent with exceeding human performance by most metrics.

I'd argue that the current system in the west already exhibits this problem to some extent. Fortunately it's a systemic issue as opposed to a technical one so there's no reason AI necessarily has to make it worse.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#58

> "An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read" This is handicapping the human doctors abilities. There is a lot more information a human doctor can gather even with a brief observation of the patient.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

So much of what I know from women in my life is that the human element of medicine is almost a strict negative for them. As a guy it hasn't been much better, but at least doctors listen to me when I say something.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#60
post #11

I'd be very very hesitant to trust studies like this. It's very easy to mess up these benchmarks. See for example this recent paper where AI managed to beat radiologists on interpreting x-rays... when the AI didn't even have access to the x-rays: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687 (on a pre existing "large scale visual question answering benchmark for generalist chest x-ray understanding" that wasn't intentionally mess…

These type of experiments are bound to have biases depending on who is doing it and who is funding it. The experiment is being funded for a particular reason itself to move the narrative in a desired direction. This is probably a good reason to have government funded research in these type of sensitive areas.
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