Increasingly powerful computers
using ever-more sophisticated programs are challenging human supremacy in areas
as diverse as playing chess and making emotionally compelling music. But can
digital diagnosticians match, or even outperform, human physicians? The answer,
according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, is not
quite. The findings, show that physicians' performance is vastly superior and
that doctors make a correct diagnosis more than twice as often as 23 commonly
used symptom-checker apps. The analysis is believed to provide the first direct
comparison between human-made and computer-based diagnoses. Diagnostic errors
stem from failure to recognize a disease or to do so in a timely manner.
Physicians make such errors roughly 10 to 15 percent of the time, researchers
say. Over the last two decades, computer-based checklists and other fail-safe
digital apps have been increasingly used to reduce medication errors or
streamline infection-prevention protocols.
Each year, hundreds of millions
of people use Internet programs or apps to check their symptoms or to
self-diagnose. Yet how these computerized symptom-checkers fare against
physicians has not been well studied. In the study, 234 internal medicine
physicians were asked to evaluate 45 clinical cases, involving both common and
uncommon conditions with varying degrees of severity. For each scenario,
physicians had to identify the most likely diagnosis along with two additional
possible diagnoses. Each clinical vignette was solved by at least 20
physicians. The physicians outperformed the symptom-checker apps, listing the
correct diagnosis first 72 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent of the
time for the digital platforms. Eighty-four percent of clinicians listed the
correct diagnosis in the top three possibilities, compared with 51 percent for
the digital symptom-checkers. The difference between physician and computer
performance was most dramatic in more severe and less common conditions. It was
smaller for less acute and more common illnesses.
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