This study does not test the doc's 'feel'. That's how an experienced doc evaluates patients, in good part. You develop an unconscious 'feel' for the stuff you see often. So, calling this study a fair comparison is actually pretty laughable.
[1] Sure, you have to test your new cancer drug on actual cancer patients, but why include the 65 year old obese patient, when you could instead include the 32 year old triathlon athlete into you cohort?
It's not just better than a blind man. It's better than any human, once you scale the task up beyond a certain point. Consequently, we should not get hung up on the path taken if the ultimate goal is the best possible care for patients in our overloaded public systems. And this paper suggests there is great potential.
Although I would tend to say we should expect machines to be significantly better than the average doctor. Before we role them out to everyone we should require them to be at least as good as the top 10% of doctors, I guess.
But regarding diagnosis, there are symptom checkers where you feed stuff in. I get the impression that multiple companies are in the process of building such tools based on crawling research papers to diagnose even very rare conditions. IIRC IBM Watson had such functionality.
I mean, it's not like rocket science. More like investing the effort to build a really big decision tree.
If there is some evidence they are gathering that ChatGPT doesn't have access to, an effort should be made to capture and systematise it. But there probably isn't very much of that for a typical doctors visit.
You don't want your doc to give your problem his/her best shot !?
> used a checklist and evidence based process that can be engineered and improved over time.
Enticing and logically evident, isn't it? Well, except in practice it would cost so much to do that, that it's clearly not economically doable. And I'm not even sure it's technically doable in 2024.
> If there is some evidence they are gathering that ChatGPT doesn't have access to, an effort should be made to capture and systematise it. But there probably isn't very much of that for a typical doctors visit.
GPT is missing most of the info, because it's not equipped with 5 human senses and a brain to aggregate them. And that's, by far the most important info. You can see the challenge in solving this problem at a large scale, I'm sure.
I don't think the doctors gut feel is going to be their best shot. I want them using logic, evidence and reason. The medical industry has a long history of people slowly managing to convince doctors to use evidence instead of making bad guesses. Explicit processes generally lead to far superior outcomes.
You're not wrong about what the present is, but you are misrepresenting what a desirable future looks like. We want to engineer the guesswork out of the system altogether.