// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions
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‘We’re going to build something that is indistinguishable from human performance … in the next couple of years,’ Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge.
‘We’re going to build something that is indistinguishable from human performance … in the next couple of years,’ Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge.
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For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now “it is finally here,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors.
The findings, published Thursday in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, Science, are based on tests pitting Microsoft’s AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft compiled the cases into its own benchmark, SDBench, which it plans to open-source. Designed to function like a panel of medical experts, Microsoft’s Diagnostic Orchestrator uses multiple AI agents to reason through symptoms and medical histories, decide what tests to order, and arrive at a diagnosis, mimicking the process doctors use to investigate cases.
On cases taken from hundreds of reports published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Microsoft’s system achieved a diagnostic accuracy of around 83 percent, compared with roughly 36 percent for generalist physicians using references and 22 percent for those working without them. The Diagnostic Orchestrator also outperformed doctors on emergency department cases drawn from a large database of patient admissions at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, scoring 80 percent accuracy compared with an average of 47 percent for human physicians. The AI system also tended to reach its diagnoses at a lower estimated cost than human counterparts.