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Doctors Perform Better Than Internet Or App-Based Symptoms Checkers, Says Study (sciencedaily.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Daily: 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, published Oct. 10 in JAMA Internal Medicine, 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. 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.
"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."
I'm surprised that digital diagnosis is that good already. The era of an "iDoc" app being as good as a gateway practitioner is probably not far off.
I'm a doctor, though not a diagnostician. Diagnosis is rarely hard - there are some hard cases, but they really mostly aren't. Do you have a persistently elevated blood glucose level? You have diabetes. Do you have consistently high blood pressure? You have hypertension. Etc. It's hardly surprising that computers are just as good as humans at diagnosing diseases that are mostly defined by strict, objective criteria.
What is harder is management - finding the right collection of drugs that will effectively treat a patient's diseases without introducing too many side effects. And what's even harder is anything procedural - we have no computers that can actually do procedures at all. Those aren't what most people think of as "going to the doctor", but it's what most doctors do - either manage disease, or do procedures, both of which are either mostly or severely beyond the ken of computers. Show me a computer that can do something as simple as put in an IV, and I'll be greatly impressed. So many subtleties boil down to "well, I saw something once that looked just like this, and the solution was X..." that it's worth trying X before going on to Y and Z.
My wife is a diagnostician - a neurologist. She sees stuff on a daily basis that would flummox any non-neurologist (really, I barely know what she's talking about half the time, and my peers would be much, much worse at that), let alone a computer. As the old joke goes, it's like being a car mechanic - who has to work on the car while it's doing 70 miles per hour down the highway, with zero downtime acceptable.
A person with years of intense medical training plus years of additional real-world medical experience beats a couple of Mountain Dew chugging pot smoking Javascript (or Swift, or Java...) coders with BA degrees in Computer Science working for an internet startup and using Wikipedia while dreaming of the "big bucks" of an IPO...
Say it aint So!
Fact: There's no such thing as artificial intelligence; there is only simulated intelligence which is FAR from the same thing. It's all just a glorified "magic 8 ball" plus a feedback mechanism.
Fact: Humans actually KNOW and UNDERSTAND things, and as such are able to actually REASON rather than simulating these things enough to fool an uneducated reporter or two or a scifi/robots fanboy. This makes humans superior in solving complex problems, and is why even computer "solutions" are actually just instances of humans figuring out a solution and than asking a computer to do the heavy trial-and-error simulations and/or data processing.
None of this makes doctors perfect - I actually dislike them rather intensely. For any problem that requires reasoning, however, the human will nearly always be superior. There will always be the occasional exception, like a drunk/incompetent human or a computer hitting the right answer by random chance, etc. There are many tasks where computers appear to upend this, like flying a plane, but they are not really in this category of tasks that require reasoning. These tasks, like flying tend to be in fields that are more about physics than about reasoning, and as soon as an emergency arises it's time to ditch the autopilot and let the human sort things out.