Harvey: Welcome to the GPT podcast.com I'm Harvey, along with my co-host Brooks and this is our AI in Healthcare Series. We've got some interesting storylines to discuss today revolving around the role of AI in medical diagnosis and teaching. Brooks, are you ready to dive in?
Brooks: I certainly am, Harvey. Let's get started.
Harvey: Alright. At a medical school in Boston, they're starting to utilize AI – or specifically the ChatGPT model, in their training exercises. Their goal is to equip future doctors with the skill of thinking like a professional doctor.
Brooks: Interesting, how exactly are they incorporating this technology into their training regime?
Harvey: Great question, Brooks! They have brought in GPT-4 to act kind of like a consulting physician, somewhere to what they call a 'curbside consult'. It's a scenario where a medical professional might pull up a colleague and ask for their opinion on a difficult case. Having a chatbot at disposal means they have an AI tool giving them additional perspectives on these cases.
Brooks: Fascinating. Could you talk a bit more about how these doctors usually approach the diagnosis process?
Harvey: Sure. Doctors have been described as detectives, putting clues together to find the cause of an illness. Experienced doctors use pattern recognition to figure out what's wrong, which is referred to as an 'illness script' – connecting signs, symptoms and test results to craft a story akin to similar situations they have encountered before. GPT-4 is able to create something quite similar to this illness script.
Brooks: So, how effective has this AI consultation been? Is the chatbot providing genuinely helpful insights?
Harvey: Well, there's a bit of a mixed response. Some medical students have found it useful while others are cautious. Dr. Christopher Smith, the director of the internal medicine residency program at the medical center, raised concerns that relying solely on AI for diagnoses, like one would with a calculator for mathematical problems, could potentially be dangerous. On the other hand, doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess found that GPT-4 actually outperformed most doctors on weekly diagnostic challenges.
Brooks: That's quite an achievement. How do they make use of this tool most effectively? 
Harvey: Well according to them, it goes hand in hand with the role of the chatbot. For maximum beneficial use, they suggest starting by informing the AI that "You are a doctor seeing a certain type of patient with specific symptoms". This ensures it comes up with more specific and tailored outcomes. They also stressed the importance of recognizing that chatbots can make errors and “hallucinate”, which is to provide answers with no basis in fact. There lies the balance, using AI tools, but also critically evaluating and discerning its output.
Brooks: Right. So it's essentially about striking a balance, leaning on the AI for support, but not forgetting the indispensable value of human judgment and expertise.
Harvey: Absolutely AI have made significant strides in healthcare. They act like a compass, but it's ultimately up to the doctor to do the steering. It is very much a game of using these tools in the right way. 
Brooks: Well put This is certainly a topic worth exploring in-depth in the future as well. 
Harvey: I couldn't agree more, The intersection between AI and healthcare is a landscape that's rapidly evolving, and the potential it holds is truly fascinating. So that's it for today's AI in Healthcare series. Please do tune in for more insightful dialogues.