Microsoft says its medical AI system can diagnose difficult cases more than twice as accurately as practicing doctors.
Dubbed the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), the system “substantially outperformed practicing generalist physicians” in diagnostic accuracy while ordering fewer tests and procedures, according to a newly published paper.
The Microsoft study, titled “Sequential Diagnosis with Language Models,” was first posted online last year on arXiv as a non-peer-reviewed preprint. On Thursday, the findings were finally published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
That’s a major step toward validating the findings, but any real-world deployment would still require clinical testing, Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told The Verge. Microsoft already has plans for that: the company’s AI health lead, Dr. Dominic King, told the publication that testing will begin at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, within the next couple of months.
In tests involving complex medical cases published in The New England Journal of Medicine, DxO achieved 83.2% diagnostic accuracy, compared with 36.1% for generalist physicians who had access to reference materials. When physicians were denied those resources, their accuracy dropped to roughly 22%, making DxO nearly four times as accurate. In a separate test involving emergency department admissions, Microsoft’s AI again outperformed generalist physicians, though by a narrower margin of 80.3% to 46.8%. The system achieved its strongest results using OpenAI’s GPT-5, with additional testing showing improvements using GPT-5.5.
“It also manages to do this at half or even one third of the cost, getting to the right diagnosis with fewer tests and procedures,” Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday.
Source link
