Hello, I'm Wang Yuquan, here is Wang Yuquan's important news comment.
The use of AI to see a doctor has always been quite controversial, some people are doing AI medical application development, and some people feel that AI is not reliable, but a parent has solved a big problem with GPT.
On September 11, NBC's website Today reported that a four-year-old boy Alex was suffering from pain, and the boy's mother, Courtney, spent three years taking him to see 17 doctors, but could not find the real cause.
It stands to reason that the current medical system is already highly developed, how can such a problem still occur? Let's first talk about their tortuous experience of seeking medical treatment.
In 2020, Alex felt an inexplicable headache, and later began to grind his teeth, and his parents thought that it might be related to tooth replacement or tooth decay, but after the dentist's examination, he thought that the teeth were normal, and recommended to see an orthodontist who treated airway obstruction, and the doctor installed an expander for Alex to solve the problem of teeth grinding.
Although the cause of the headache was not found, the symptoms were not obvious, but later the headache symptoms reappeared, and they went to see a neurologist and concluded that it was migraine.
Moreover, Alex had problems walking uncoordinatedly on the left and right feet, and the pediatrician recommended them to do physical therapy, and the physical therapist believed that Alex may have a disease called "Chiari deformity", which can cause headaches and unsteady walking.
This made them even more confused, so they found more doctors, adding up to 17, but still no accurate conclusions.
In the end, her mother Courtney used GPT with the mentality of trying it out, and entered Alex's various symptoms and test results, and GPT concluded that "tethered cord syndrome", which is a disease caused by spina bifida and other problems that cause the spinal cord to be stretched and compressed.
Courtney approached the neurosurgeon with that conclusion, and this time it was finally diagnosed.
So the question is, why can GPT give an answer that none of the 17 doctors have made?
This is because today's generative artificial intelligence brings together the massive amount of information in the Internet, which can be said to be a collection of all the information in the human knowledge base, and its knowledge exceeds that of each individual doctor, and it is naturally able to make more comprehensive judgments.
In the modern medical system, specialties are becoming more and more subdivided, and doctors in various departments are very familiar with the diseases related to their specialty, but some complex and rare diseases intertwined with multiple diseases may be beyond their cognitive scope and may not be able to make accurate judgments.
The aforementioned "tethered cord syndrome" is relatively rare, according to statistics, the incidence of such diseases in the United States is 0.3-1.43 ‰, while the US rare disease standard is 1/1500, that is, 0.6 ‰, that is, this disease has entered the category of rare diseases.
Moreover, Alex suffers from the rarer "hidden tethered cord syndrome", that is, hidden spinal cord problems that are not visible from the body surface, and more specialized neurosurgeons can identify them from medical images.
The so-called "surgical profession has a specialty", doctors in other departments may not have heard of similar diseases at all, and even if they do, they may not necessarily remember the complete pathological features, so this is actually the overall problem of modern medicine, and a specific specialist cannot be blamed.
However, for AI, as long as it is exposed to relevant rare disease knowledge during the training process, it will remain in the database for a long time, and after receiving human questions, it can make relatively accurate feedback.
Just like AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol, it remembers all the possibilities of the game and is able to make better choices.
In the same way, AI not only remembers the names of all known diseases, but also remembers the pathology behind them and the various manifestations of patients, and in the era of generative AI, it can play a good role in consultation with good understanding and communication skills.
The problem is that the application of AI in the medical and health field is still controversial, with some people saying that AI is not safe, others saying that AI is too cold and scary, and others worrying that AI will replace doctors. However, when we face the advancement of new technologies, we must not just fear and worry about being replaced, but need to think about how to use new technologies to better solve problems!
Judging from Alex's experience, it is precisely because of the limited cognition of parents and specialists that they have to run around to find various doctors and have to endure three years of pain, of course, in 2020, GPT-4 has not yet appeared, and there is no powerful AI that can help them make a comprehensive diagnosis.
Previously, the traditional way to deal with intractable diseases was to have specialist consultations, where experts from different departments sat down to discuss solutions, but specialist consultations usually only appeared in very critical situations, and Alex's symptoms alone were not fatal.
Moreover, expert consultation is actually a high-end service, not everyone can enjoy inclusive services, and Courtney and GPT communication, is equivalent to communicating with consultants with multiple professional knowledge, which is actually a more intelligent and inclusive expert consultation.
In other words, AI has the potential to make expert healthcare consulting available to every patient.
At the same time, if the doctors Alex met can use the "knowledgeable" AI assistant, even if they do not understand "tethered cord syndrome" themselves, they can get more comprehensive diagnostic advice outside their own knowledge system, and the real cause may be detected earlier.
Of course, this does not mean that AI will replace doctors, in fact, Courtney did not easily trust the judgment of GPT, but joined the community of parents related to spinal cord diseases, carefully verified and then found a professional doctor to make a final diagnosis.
Therefore, the role of artificial intelligence is a good helper for patients and doctors, which can not only improve the efficiency of medical diagnosis of patients, but also help doctors provide more medical services, in other words, consultants of human medical and health services.
We are also doing artificial intelligence training, the purpose is to make artificial intelligence experts become your "Zhongnanhai health care doctors" and provide high-quality, sustainable and inclusive health services.
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