--- title: "New AI Gives Doctors Advice on Patient’s Ailments Like a Human Colleague" description: "Researchers at Cornell University created an AI that is a lot more transparent about the medical literature it cites, earning praise from doctors using it." date: "2023-04-06" modified: "2023-04-06" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/ai-gives-advice-patients-doctors-trust" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Developments" - "Health & Medicine" tags: - "generative ai" - "medical ai" --- # New AI Gives Doctors Advice on Patient’s Ailments Like a Human Colleague ![Researchers at Cornell University created an AI that is a lot more transparent about the medical literature it cites, earning praise from doctors using it.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* Doctors experimenting with AI tools to help diagnose patients is [nothing new](). But getting them to trust the AIs they're using is another matter entirely. To establish that trust, researchers at Cornell University attempted to create a more transparent AI system that works by counseling doctors in the same way a human colleague would — that is, arguing over what the medical literature says. Their resulting [study](), which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems later this month, found that how a medical AI works isn't nearly as important to earning a doctor's trust as the sources it cites in its suggestions. "A doctor's primary job is not to learn how AI works," said Qian Yang, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell who led the study, in a [press release](). "If we can build systems that help validate AI suggestions based on clinical trial results and journal articles, which are trustworthy information for doctors, then we can help them understand whether the AI is likely to be right or wrong for each specific case." After interviewing and surveying a group of twelve doctors and clinical librarians, the researchers found that when these medical experts disagree on what to do next, they turn to the relevant biomedical research and weigh up its merits. Their system, therefore, aimed to emulate this process. "We built a system that basically tries to recreate the interpersonal communication that we observed when the doctors give suggestions to each other, and fetches the same kind of evidence from clinical literature to support the AI's suggestion," Yang said. The AI tool Yang's team created is based on GPT-3, an older large language model that once powered OpenAI's [ChatGPT](). The tool's interface is fairly straightforward: on one side, it provides the AI's suggestions. The other side contrasts this with relevant biomedical literature the AI gleaned, plus brief summaries of each study and other helpful nuggets of information like patient outcomes. So far, the team has developed their tool with three different medical specializations: neurology, psychiatry, and palliative care. When the doctors tried the versions tailored to their respective field, they told the researchers that they liked the presentation of the medical literature, and affirmed they preferred it to an explanation of how the AI worked. While the feedback sounds promising, the study surveyed the opinions of only a dozen experts, a small sample size that's unlikely to be generalizable. Either way, this specialized AI seems to be faring better than [ChatGPT's attempt of playing the doctor]() in a larger study, which found that 60 percent of its answers to real medical scenarios disagreed with human experts' opinions or were too irrelevant to be helpful. **But** the jury is still out on how the Cornell researchers' AI would hold up when subjected to a similar analysis. Overall, it's worth noting that while these tools *may* be helpful to doctors who have years of expertise to inform their decisions, we're still a very long way out from an ["AI medical advisor"]() that can replace them. **More on medical AI:** *[Microsoft Released an AI That Answers Medical Questions, But It’s Wildly Inaccurate]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()