https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849 close this message arXiv smileybones arXiv Is Hiring a DevOps Engineer Work on one of the world's most important websites and make an impact on open science. View Jobs Skip to main content Cornell University arXiv Is Hiring a DevOps Engineer View Jobs We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and all contributors. Donate arxiv logo > cs > arXiv:2412.10849 [ ] Help | Advanced Search [All fields ] Search arXiv logo Cornell University Logo [ ] GO quick links * Login * Help Pages * About Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2412.10849 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Dec 2024 (v1), last revised 19 May 2025 (this version, v2)] Title:Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician Authors:Peter G. Brodeur, Thomas A. Buckley, Zahir Kanjee, Ethan Goh, Evelyn Bin Ling, Priyank Jain, Stephanie Cabral, Raja-Elie Abdulnour, Adrian D. Haimovich, Jason A. Freed, Andrew Olson, Daniel J. Morgan, Jason Hom, Robert Gallo, Liam G. McCoy, Haadi Mombini, Christopher Lucas, Misha Fotoohi, Matthew Gwiazdon, Daniele Restifo, Daniel Restrepo, Eric Horvitz, Jonathan Chen, Arjun K. Manrai, Adam Rodman View a PDF of the paper titled Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician, by Peter G. Brodeur and 24 other authors View PDF Abstract:A seminal paper published by Ledley and Lusted in 1959 introduced complex clinical diagnostic reasoning cases as the gold standard for the evaluation of expert medical computing systems, a standard that has held ever since. Here, we report the results of a physician evaluation of a large language model (LLM) on challenging clinical cases against a baseline of hundreds of physicians. We conduct five experiments to measure clinical reasoning across differential diagnosis generation, display of diagnostic reasoning, triage differential diagnosis, probabilistic reasoning, and management reasoning, all adjudicated by physician experts with validated psychometrics. We then report a real-world study comparing human expert and AI second opinions in randomly-selected patients in the emergency room of a major tertiary academic medical center in Boston, MA. We compared LLMs and board-certified physicians at three predefined diagnostic touchpoints: triage in the emergency room, initial evaluation by a physician, and admission to the hospital or intensive care unit. In all experiments--both vignettes and emergency room second opinions--the LLM displayed superhuman diagnostic and reasoning abilities, as well as continued improvement from prior generations of AI clinical decision support. Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning, fulfilling the vision put forth by Ledley and Lusted, and motivating the urgent need for prospective trials. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2412.10849 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2412.10849v2 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.10849 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Arjun Manrai [view email] [v1] Sat, 14 Dec 2024 14:46:18 UTC (1,601 KB) [v2] Mon, 19 May 2025 14:26:07 UTC (1,996 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician, by Peter G. 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