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Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Microsoft's new AI tool a medical genius? Tech giant claims it is 4x more accurate than real doctors
Tech giant Microsoft, recently hit with a fresh round of layoffs, has developed a new medical AI tool that performs better than human doctors at complex health diagnoses, creating a 'path to medical superintelligence'. The Microsoft AI team shared research that demonstrated how AI can sequentially investigate and solve medicine's most complex diagnostic challenges—cases that expert physicians struggle to answer. Tech company's AI unit, led by the British tech pioneer Mustafa Suleyman , has developed a system that imitates a panel of expert physicians tackling 'diagnostically complex and intellectually demanding' cases. Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) correctly diagnosed up to 85% of NEJM case proceedings, a rate more than four times higher than a group of experienced physicians. MAI-DxO also gets to the correct diagnosis more cost-effectively than physicians, the company said in a blog post. ALSO READ: Microsoft layoffs: Tech giant's sales head Judson Althoff asked to go on two-month leave. Here's why Microsoft says AI system better than doctors The Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator', or MAI-DxO for short, the AI-powered tool is developed by the company's AI health unit, which was founded last year by Mustafa Suleyman. The tech giant said when paired with OpenAI's advanced o3 AI model, its approach 'solved' more than eight of 10 case studies specially chosen for the diagnostic challenge. When those case studies were tried on practising physicians – who had no access to colleagues, textbooks or chatbots – the accuracy rate was two out of 10. Microsoft said it was also a cheaper option than using human doctors because it was more efficient at ordering tests. When benchmarked against real-world case records, the new medical AI tool 'correctly diagnoses up to 85% of NEJM case proceedings, a rate more than four times higher than a group of experienced physicians' while being more impressive is that these cases are from the New England Journal of Medicine and are very complex and require multiple specialists and tests before doctors can reach any conclusion. Live Events According to The Wired, the Microsoft team used 304 case studies sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine to devise a test called the Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark. A language model broke down each case into a step-by-step process that a doctor would perform in order to reach a diagnosis. ALSO READ: Melania should be on first boat: Deportation calls for US' First Lady gains traction amid Trump's immigration crackdown Microsoft new AI tool diagnosed 85% cases For this, the company used different large language models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, xAI and DeepSeek. Microsoft said that the new AI medical tool correctly diagnosed 85.5 per cent of cases, which is way better compared to experienced human doctors, who were able to correctly diagnose only 20 per cent of the cases. "This orchestration mechanism—multiple agents that work together in this chain-of-debate style—that's what's going to drive us closer to medical superintelligence,' Suleyman told The Wired. Microsoft announced it is building a system designed to mimic the step-by-step approach of real-world clinicians—asking targeted questions, ordering diagnostic tests, and narrowing down possibilities to reach an accurate diagnosis. For example, a patient presenting with a cough and fever might be guided through blood tests and a chest X-ray before the system determines a diagnosis like pneumonia. ALSO READ: Sean Diddy Combs' secret plan against his ex Jennifer Lopez emerges amid sex-trafficking trial Microsoft said its approach was able to wield a 'breadth and depth of expertise' that went beyond individual physicians because it could span multiple medical disciplines. It added: 'Scaling this level of reasoning – and beyond – has the potential to reshape healthcare. AI could empower patients to self-manage routine aspects of care and equip clinicians with advanced decision support for complex cases.' Microsoft acknowledged its work is not ready for clinical use. Further testing is needed on its 'orchestrator' to assess its performance on more common symptoms, for instance. Economic Times WhatsApp channel )
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Health
- Time Magazine
Microsoft's AI Is Better Than Doctors at Diagnosing Disease
Medicine may be a combination of art and science, but Microsoft just showed that much of both can be learned—by a bot. The company reports in a study published on the preprint site arXiv that its AI-based medical program, the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), correctly diagnosed 85% of cases described in the New England Journal of Medicine. That's four times higher than the accuracy rate of human doctors, who came up with the right diagnoses about 20% of the time. The cases are part of the journal's weekly series designed to stump doctors: complicated, challenging scenarios where the diagnosis isn't obvious. Microsoft took about 300 of these cases and compared the performance of its MAI-DxO to that of 21 general-practice doctors in the U.S. and U.K. In order to mimic the iterative way doctors typically approach such cases—by collecting information, analyzing it, ordering tests, and then making decisions based on those results—Microsoft's team first created a stepwise decision-making benchmark process for each case study. This allowed both the doctors and the AI system to ask questions and make decisions about next steps, such as ordering tests, based on the information they learned at each step—similar to a flow chart for decision-making, with subsequent questions and actions based on information gleaned from previous ones. The 21 doctors were compared to a pooled set of off-the-shelf AI models that included Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, GPT, Grok, and Llama. To further mirror the way human doctors approach such challenging cases, the Microsoft team also built an Orchestrator: a virtual emulation of the sounding board of colleagues and consultations that physicians often seek out in complex cases. In the real world, ordering medical tests costs money, so Microsoft tracked the tests that the AI system and human doctors ordered to see which method could get it done more cheaply. Not only did MAI-DxO far outperform doctors in landing on the correct diagnosis, but the AI bot was able to do so at a 20% lower cost on average. Read More: If Thimerosal Is Safe, Why Is It Being Removed From Vaccines? 'The four-fold increase in accuracy was more than previous studies have shown,' says Dr. Eric Topol, chair of translational medicine and director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who provided insights on the project. 'Most of the time there is a 10% absolute percentage difference, so this is a really big jump." But what really got his attention was cost. "Not only was the AI more accurate, but it was much less expensive,' he says. MAI-DxO is still in development and not available for use outside of research yet. But incorporating such a model into medicine could potentially lead to reductions in medical errors, which account for a significant share of health care costs, and increase the efficiency of human doctors—which could in turn lead to better outcomes for patients. 'This is a startling result,' says Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. 'I think it gives us a clear line of sight to making the very best expert diagnostics available to everybody in the world at an unbelievably affordable price point.' A decade ago, when AI algorithms were first introduced in medicine, they were focused on binary tasks, Suleyman says, such as scanning images to detect tumors. 'Today, these models are having fluent conversations at very high quality, asking the right questions and probing in the right ways, suggesting the right testing and interventions at the right time,' he says. Another advantage an AI system may have is that it's free of many of the biases inherent in the human experience. 'We all have confirmation bias,' says Dr. Dominic King, vice president of Microsoft AI. 'Sometimes clinicians will see something and think, 'I'm sure this is just like the patient I saw last week.' But AI is thinking slightly differently.' Read More: The Surprising Reason Rural Hospitals Are Closing MAI-DxO doesn't just spit out an answer. It shows its work, so that doctors can potentially study and scrutinize its reasoning process. 'It's available for real-time oversight by the human clinician," says Suleyman. "That's a level of transparency and visibility into the thinking process that we haven't seen before.' That, in turn, could improve the education and training doctors receive to further increase diagnostic accuracy and ultimately patient outcomes. Still, some experts in the field of AI and medicine note that Microsoft's approach isn't entirely novel, since its diagnoses depended on the combined performance of multiple AI models. "In my mind, they are not testing any individual model that is optimized for health care," says Keith Dreyer, chief data science officer at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Clinical Data Science. "They are testing the concept of testing all of the models out there today and combining their decision-making together. That part to me is not surprising." Dreyer also points out that the results don't necessarily bring such systems closer to being approved by regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which still hasn't weighed in on whether such systems are medical devices or not. Read More: What Getting 105 Blood Tests From a Health Startup Taught Me Microsoft isn't the only company pursuing an AI-based medical program for diagnosing disease. Google is developing a conversation-based system to emulate the doctor-patient back-and-forth, mimicking the reasoning of human physicians in collecting information from patients and interpreting those symptoms to land on a diagnosis. In early tests, the system outperformed doctors in accurately diagnosing simulated patient case studies. In a 2024 test similar to the one Microsoft performed using case studies, the earlier version of Google's system accurately diagnosed 59% of cases, compared to human doctors' rate of 33%. The real test, however, will be seeing how these AI systems perform in actual health systems. That's the next step for understanding how AI could complement or supplement the doctor's role in diagnosing disease. 'It's impressive what they did,' says Topol. 'But it doesn't change medical practice until they take it out on the real medical highway.' Topol hopes the AI systems will be tested in different health systems, where doctors and the AI platform could be compared on a number of different and more typical cases. That would require a full-scale clinical trial, as well as approval from regulatory agencies to ensure no patients will be exposed to harm by relying more heavily on AI-based decision-making in delivering their care. 'We are very much on that journey to create the evidence base required to support both clinicians and patients to make a difference in their health,' says King. If confirmed, results like these could set the stage for introducing high-quality medical expertise in parts of the world that may not currently have access to major academic institutions or cutting-edge health care. 'My primary focus in the next five to 10 years is to make sure everybody in the world gets access to the very best medical advice of all kinds,' says Suleyman. 'We are very, very excited about this.'
Business Insider
3 days ago
- Health
- Business Insider
Microsoft says its new health AI beat doctors in accurate diagnoses by a mile
Microsoft said its medical AI system diagnosed cases more accurately than human doctors by a wide margin. In a blog post published on Monday, the tech giant said its AI system, the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator, diagnosed cases four times as accurately as a group of experienced physicians in a test. Microsoft's study comes as AI tools rapidly make their way into hospitals and clinics, raising questions about how much of medicine can or should be automated and what role doctors will play as diagnostic AI systems get more capable. The experiment involved 304 case studies sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine. Both the AI and physicians had to solve these cases step by step, just like they would in a real clinic: ordering tests, asking questions, and narrowing down possibilities. The AI system was paired with large language models from tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google. When coupled with OpenAI's o3, the AI diagnostic system correctly solved 85.5% of the cases, Microsoft said. By contrast, 21 practicing physicians from the US and UK — each with five to 20 years of experience — averaged 20% accuracy across the completed cases, the companyadded. In the study, the doctors did not have access to resources they might typically tap for diagnostics, including coworkers, books, and AI. The AI system also solved cases "more cost-effectively" than its human counterparts, Microsoft said. "Our findings also suggest that AI reduce unnecessary healthcare costs. US health spending is nearing 20% of US GDP, with up to 25% of that estimated to be wasted," it added. "We're taking a big step towards medical superintelligence," said Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft's AI division, in a post on X. He added that the cases used in the study are "some of the toughest and most diagnostically complex" a physician can face. Suleyman previously led AI efforts at Google. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Will AI replace doctors? Microsoft said in the blog post that AI "represents a complement to doctors and other health professionals." "While this technology is advancing rapidly, their clinical roles are much broader than simply making a diagnosis. They need to navigate ambiguity and build trust with patients and their families in a way that AI isn't set up to do," Microsoft said. "Clinical roles will, we believe, evolve with AI," it added. Tech leaders like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates have said that AI could help solve the long-standing shortage of doctors. "AI will come in and provide medical IQ, and there won't be a shortage," he said on an episode of the "People by WTF" podcast published in April. But doctors have told BI that AI can't and shouldn't replace clinicians just yet. AI can't replicate physicians' presence, empathy, and nuanced judgment in uncertain or complex conditions, said Dr. Shravan Verma, the CEO of a Singapore-based health tech startup. Chatbots and AI tools can handle the first mile of care, but they must escalate to qualified professionals when needed, he told BI last month.
AU Financial Review
4 days ago
- Health
- AU Financial Review
Microsoft claims AI diagnostic tool can outperform doctors
London/San Francisco | Microsoft has built an artificial intelligence-powered medical tool it claims is four times more successful than human doctors at diagnosing complex ailments, as the tech giant unveils research it believes could speed up treatment. The 'Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator' is the first initiative to come out of an AI health unit formed last year by Mustafa Suleyman with staff poached from DeepMind, the research lab he co-founded and which is now owned by rival Google. Financial Times
Mint
4 days ago
- Health
- Mint
Microsoft claims its AI Diagnostic Orchestrator outperformed 21 doctors, got 85.5% of diagnoses right
Microsoft has introduced a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that it says can diagnose some of the most difficult medical cases more accurately and at a lower cost than human doctors. The system, called the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), was tested using case studies published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). These cases are known for being particularly complex and usually involve teams of specialists. According to Microsoft, the AI got the correct diagnosis 85.5 per cent of the time, compared to just 20 per cent for a group of experienced doctors from the US and UK. As more people turn to digital tools for medical advice, the company says it sees over 50 million health-related searches every day across its services like Bing and Copilot. To test the system, Microsoft created a new challenge called the Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark (SD Bench), based on 304 real NEJM cases. The cases were turned into step-by-step scenarios, where the AI or a human doctor could ask questions or order tests before making a diagnosis. Each test had a virtual cost, helping to measure both accuracy and how wisely resources were used. Microsoft tested several top AI models, including OpenAI's o3, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and DeepSeek, both alone and as part of MAI-DxO. The orchestrator system works by combining different models to act like a team of doctors, sharing ideas and narrowing down possible diagnoses. The best results came from using MAI-DxO with OpenAI's o3 model, the tech giant stated. Reportedly, the results showed that the AI not only diagnosed more cases correctly but also did so with fewer and more cost-effective tests than the doctors involved in the study. However, Microsoft admitted the research has its limits. The tests focused on rare and complex cases, not everyday health problems. Also, the doctors were not allowed to use any support tools like books or the internet during the test, unlike in real-world situations where such resources are often used. Other tools developed by the company include RAD-DINO, which helps improve radiology processes, and Dragon Copilot, a voice assistant for doctors. Microsoft says it is now working with health organisations to test its AI in real clinics and hospitals. Before any wider use, the technology will need to meet safety standards and get approval from regulators.
