Harsha Nori, Mayank Daswani, Christopher Kelly, Scott Lundberg, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Marc Wilson, Xiaoxuan Liu, Viknesh Sounderajah, Jonathan M. Carlson, Matthew P. Lungren, Bay Gross, Peter Hames, Mustafa Suleyman, Dominic King, Eric Horvitz
{"title":"Sequential diagnosis with language models","authors":"Harsha Nori, Mayank Daswani, Christopher Kelly, Scott Lundberg, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Marc Wilson, Xiaoxuan Liu, Viknesh Sounderajah, Jonathan M. Carlson, Matthew P. Lungren, Bay Gross, Peter Hames, Mustafa Suleyman, Dominic King, Eric Horvitz","doi":"10.1126/science.aeh7930","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div >We explored the capabilities of frontier language models in sequential diagnosis, a diagnostic paradigm that captures the iterative nature of clinical reasoning. Given a brief clinical presentation, clinicians selectively acquired information to reach a diagnosis, enabling assessment of diagnostic accuracy and workup cost. We developed an interactive benchmark and an artificial intelligence (AI) system that simulates a panel of physicians, continually revising the differential diagnosis and selecting cost-effective tests. Using this benchmark, the system achieved 83.2% accuracy on <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i> clinicopathological conference cases and 80.3% on MIMIC-IV-ED emergency department admissions, outperforming generalist physicians (36.1 and 46.8%, respectively). Although these findings were obtained in a controlled benchmark setting, they highlight the promise of language models for supporting more accurate, lower-cost diagnoses.</div>","PeriodicalId":21678,"journal":{"name":"Science","volume":"394 6822","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":47.3000,"publicationDate":"2026-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.science.org/doi/reader/10.1126/science.aeh7930","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Science","FirstCategoryId":"103","ListUrlMain":"https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh7930","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"综合性期刊","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We explored the capabilities of frontier language models in sequential diagnosis, a diagnostic paradigm that captures the iterative nature of clinical reasoning. Given a brief clinical presentation, clinicians selectively acquired information to reach a diagnosis, enabling assessment of diagnostic accuracy and workup cost. We developed an interactive benchmark and an artificial intelligence (AI) system that simulates a panel of physicians, continually revising the differential diagnosis and selecting cost-effective tests. Using this benchmark, the system achieved 83.2% accuracy on New England Journal of Medicine clinicopathological conference cases and 80.3% on MIMIC-IV-ED emergency department admissions, outperforming generalist physicians (36.1 and 46.8%, respectively). Although these findings were obtained in a controlled benchmark setting, they highlight the promise of language models for supporting more accurate, lower-cost diagnoses.
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