AI vs. Doctors: Debunking Overhyped Claims

🎯 Reality Check: Sketchy 🚩

📝 Why: There’s no strong evidence that any current medical AI outperforms groups of experienced doctors by four times, especially on real, complex patient cases. Research at times shows AIs can identify rare diseases well or assist with specific cases. But the “four times better” stat seems way off-base. In reality, most studies show AIs can perform as well as some clinicians in specific tasks (e.g. skin lesion spotting—Esteva, Nature 2017), but not drastically better across the board. As the BMJ said in 2019, “no current AI systems can outperform human clinicians for medical diagnosis across a broad range of complex, real-world patients.”

🔗 Source: BMJ, 2019; Esteva et al., Nature, 2017; Topol, Deep Medicine, 2019