Eric Topol February 2, 2025
Interpreting Some Surprising Results
Our op-ed in today’s NY Times explores an unexpected finding. A series of recent studies compared the performance of doctors with A.I. versus A.I. alone, spanning medical scans, diagnostic accuracy, and management reasoning. Surprisingly, in many cases, A.I. systems working independently performed better than when combined with physician input. This pattern emerged consistently across different medical tasks, from chest X-ray and mammography interpretation to clinical decision-making. In some of the studies, summarized in the Table below, the gap for performance favoring A.I. alone was large.
All along most of us in the medical community had anticipated the combination would achieve superior results. What explains these counterintuitive findings? They could simply reflect that physicians haven’t been well...
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