Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2312.00164 v1 pith:6G74KY6D submitted 2023-11-30 cs.CY cs.AI

classification cs.CYcs.AI
keywords cliniciansassistanceaccuracyassisteddifferentialmedicalabilityaccurate
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

An accurate differential diagnosis (DDx) is a cornerstone of medical care, often reached through an iterative process of interpretation that combines clinical history, physical examination, investigations and procedures. Interactive interfaces powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to both assist and automate aspects of this process. In this study, we introduce an LLM optimized for diagnostic reasoning, and evaluate its ability to generate a DDx alone or as an aid to clinicians. 20 clinicians evaluated 302 challenging, real-world medical cases sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) case reports. Each case report was read by two clinicians, who were randomized to one of two assistive conditions: either assistance from search engines and standard medical resources, or LLM assistance in addition to these tools. All clinicians provided a baseline, unassisted DDx prior to using the respective assistive tools. Our LLM for DDx exhibited standalone performance that exceeded that of unassisted clinicians (top-10 accuracy 59.1% vs 33.6%, [p = 0.04]). Comparing the two assisted study arms, the DDx quality score was higher for clinicians assisted by our LLM (top-10 accuracy 51.7%) compared to clinicians without its assistance (36.1%) (McNemar's Test: 45.7, p < 0.01) and clinicians with search (44.4%) (4.75, p = 0.03). Further, clinicians assisted by our LLM arrived at more comprehensive differential lists than those without its assistance. Our study suggests that our LLM for DDx has potential to improve clinicians' diagnostic reasoning and accuracy in challenging cases, meriting further real-world evaluation for its ability to empower physicians and widen patients' access to specialist-level expertise.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. CausalFlip: A Benchmark for LLM Causal Judgment Beyond Semantic Matching

    cs.AI 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new benchmark and training strategy show LLMs trained to internalize causal reasoning steps are less fooled by semantically similar, label-flipped questions than models using explicit chain-of-thought.

  2. MedBLINK: Probing Basic Perception in Multimodal Language Models for Medicine

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Current medical multimodal models, including GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, fail simple perceptual tasks on medical images that human experts solve almost perfectly.

  3. MM-Agent: LLM as Agents for Real-world Mathematical Modeling Problem

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MM-Agent, a multi-stage LLM pipeline with a hierarchical modeling method library, is claimed to outperform prior agents and award-winning human solutions on a new 111-problem MCM/ICM-based mathematical modeling benchmark.

  4. Dr. GPT Will See You Now, but Should It? Exploring the Benefits and Harms of Large Language Models in Medical Diagnosis using Crowdsourced Clinical Cases

    cs.CY 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    In a physician-rated crowdsourced study, 76% of LLM responses to everyday health queries were valid, with GPT-4o highest (85%) and Llama3-8b lowest (50%); RAG did not consistently improve responses.

Pith tools