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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

#61
I don't think AI is a good use case for such critical situations. Maybe in a decade we have AI help out doctors with doing a pre check. What if Ai finds nothing and the doctor does not bother to look into it further? It is this small question which breaks the technology from any angle later down the road from my POV. AI has to stay optional here.

Even if AI is used to sample or summarize a lot of data that a human couldn't do in time: What if it misses something that a human won't? What if a human inversely misses something that AI won't? Would you rather trust the machine or the human? (Especially if the human is held accountable.)

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

#62
post #51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gotcha, I was thinking more about radiologists than patient-facing doctors.

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

#63
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…

I'm even more concerned that current models are not trained to say no, or to even recognize most failure modes.

"Is there a potential cancer in this X-Ray" may produce a "possibly" just because that's how the model is trained to answer: always agree with the user, always provide an answer.

Oh, and don't forget that "Is there a potential cancer in this X-Ray" and "Are there any potential problems in this X-Ray" are two completely different prompts that will lead to wildly different answers.

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

#64

I'll repeat my idea on how this MUST be done: 1. AI gets data about the patient and makes a diagnosis. This is NOT shown to doctor yet. 2. Doctor does their stuff, writes down their diagnosis. This diagnosis is locked down and versioned. 3. Doctor sees AI's diagnosis 4. Doctor can adjust their diagnosis, BUT the original stays in the system. This way the AI stays as the assistant and won't affect the doctor's decisio…

5. Private Equity uses this valuable data to stack rank doctors based on how correct / AI-aligned their diagnoses are over time 6. Rankings are used to periodically "trim the fact" thus delivering more optimized cash flows to clinics that have been saddled with toxic debt 7. Sensing an opportunity AI providers start selling a $200 / month Data Leakage as a Service subscription to overworked physicians so that they ca…

A more realistic step 7 is that physicians gradually align their diagnoses with the LLM as they sacrifice to Moloch in order to (temporarily) game the metric. Eventually the humans become little more than an imperfect proxy for the LLMs and are eliminated.

I agree with GP's solution but we'd need regulation to prohibit what you describe.

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

#65

I'll repeat my idea on how this MUST be done: 1. AI gets data about the patient and makes a diagnosis. This is NOT shown to doctor yet. 2. Doctor does their stuff, writes down their diagnosis. This diagnosis is locked down and versioned. 3. Doctor sees AI's diagnosis 4. Doctor can adjust their diagnosis, BUT the original stays in the system. This way the AI stays as the assistant and won't affect the doctor's decisio…

5. Doctors delegate everything to AI assistants because humans are lazy, especially if those AI assistants are correct some significant portion of the time

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

#66

> "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

#67
All the other points raised in this thread aside, it seems like an odd thing to benchmark because a significant proportion of ER practice is dealing with emergencies, often accidental injuries. There's not a whole of diagnosing going on if you show up to ER with a gash on your forehead or a missing finger.

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

#68
Believable and not shocking. LLMs literally may have saved my sons and potentially her mother too by allowing us to fact check a lot of non sense data and scare tactics by a group of at least 5 different doctors ambushing us to make a life changing decision in minutes. The problem is doctors, at least in the US, prioritize liability exposure over patients long term outcomes. Let’s say you need an intervention where two options A and B are available to you. A carries 1% risk of complications but a great outcome. Option B has 0.1% risk of complications but once you are discharged the short term effects are challenging and long term effects not well understood. Well, 10/10 times doctors will suggest option B and will do anything they can to nudge you into making that choice, like not telling you the absolute numbers and constantly using the word “death”. They also lie about the outcomes, because again, once you accept the procedure, sign and are sent home, they have nothing to do with you.

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

#69

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?

The human doesn't need to be as highly trained and paid as a doctor if the human is not performing tasks concordant with that training.
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