AI Chatbot Medical-Educational Toolbox

"Patients with cirrhosis and/or liver cancer and their caregivers often have unmet needs and insufficient knowledge about managing and preventing complications of their disease."

"We found ChatGPT -- while it has limitations -- can help empower patients and improve health literacy for different populations."

"More research is still needed to better examine the tool in patient education, but we believe ChatGPT to be a very useful adjunctive tool for physicians -- not a replacement -- but adjunctive tool that provides access to reliable and accurate health information that is easy for many to understand."

"We hope that this can help physicians to empower patients and improve health literacy for patients facing challenging conditions such as cirrhosis and liver cancer."

Brennan Spiegel, director of Health Services Research, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles

"The complexity of care required for this patient population makes patient empowerment with knowledge about their disease crucial for optimal outcomes."

"While there are currently online resources for patients and caregivers, the literature available is often lengthy and difficult for many to understanding, highlighting the limited options for this group."

Alexander Kuo, medical director, Liver Transplantation Medicine, Cedars-Sinai

"ChatGPT has [been] shown able to provide professional, yet highly comprehensible responses."

"However, this is one of the first studies to examine the ability of ChatGPT to answer clinically oriented, disease-specific questions correctly and compare its performance to [that of] physicians and trainees."

Yee Hui Yeo, clinical fellow, Karsh Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Cedars-Sinai

A new Cedars-Sinai study found ChatGPT—while it has limitations—can help empower patients and improve health literacy for different populations. Photo by Getty.

 

According to a new study reflecting research out of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, published in the journal Clinical and Molecular Hepatology, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence platform, has the potential of improving the prognosis of patients suffering from cirrhosis and liver cancer. The chatbot as controversial as it has been to date, could become a valuable tool, providing patients with knowledge of lifestyle and treatment information, conveyed in easily understood terms.

 

MedPageToday

Of the 3,500 Canadians diagnosed with liver cancer in 2022, approximately 1,650 of the total are thought to have died of the disease in that same year. Liver cancer's five-year net survival rate is just 22 percent. Representing the end-stage form of liver disease, Cirrhosis is a major risk factor for liver cancer; and both conditions require an extensive litany of therapies, difficult for some patients to manage on their own.

ChatGPT (chat generative pre-trained transformer) are becoming popular for personalized education purposes resulting from their capacity to respond to user prompts with human-quality responses that are drawn from vast databases. The health-care industry has already understood the usefulness of the software through its ability to compose basic medical reports and respond correctly to questions commonly appearing on medical school exams.

The research team in testing ChatGPT's cirrhosis and liver cancer knowledge, presented the chatbot with 164 frequently asked questions divided into five categories: basic knowledge, diagnosis, treatment, lifestyle or preventive medicine. The results were studied and graded by two liver transplant specialists, according to whom ChatGPT answered roughly 77 percent of questions correctly, with high accuracy levels in over 90 percent of questions of varying categories.

The liver specialists who graded the answers however, found that 75 percent of responses relating to basic knowledge, treatment and lifestyle categories were correct, yet fell short in adequacy. In that the proportion of responses "mixed with correct and incorrect data", worked out to: basic knowledge (22 percent); diagnosis (33 percent); diagnosis (33 percent); treatment (25 percent); lifestyle (18 percent); and preventive medicine (50 percent). 

 

It was established that while the software succeeded in offering useful advice to patients and caregivers dealing with cirrhosis and liver cancer, the study clarified that superior information is given from a doctor directly. Peter Lee, corporate vice president at Microsoft had an essay published in The New England Journal of Medicine, addressing the issue. He contended that society faced a choice whether to use ChatGPT in the health-care industry. 

The software has already demonstrated its value to the health-care industry with its ability to compose basic medical reports. GETTY

"We can try to slow down or shut down this technology, because we don't understand the risks completely."

"A second argument is more fatalist, saying: 'It's unstoppable. We might as well give it a try."

"A third choice, which I think is the only rational one, but it has to be made intentionally, is to think hard about how to integrate this technology into our lives so that we can be accomplishing things that neither humans nor AI alone can do."

"I'm hoping the medical community and the public will choose that third option."

Peter Lee, Microsoft corporate vice-president, research and incubation