Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT-4 in Predicting Refractive Surgery Categorizations: Comparative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Refractive surgery research aims to optimally precategorize patients by their suitability for various types of surgery. Recent advances have led to the development of artificial intelligence–powered algorithms, including machine learning approaches, to assess risks and enhance workflow. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4 (OpenAI LP) have emerged as potential general artificial intelligence tools that can assist across various disciplines, possibly including refractive surgery decision-making. However, their actual capabilities in precategorizing refractive surgery patients based on real-world parameters remain unexplored. Objective This exploratory study aimed to validate ChatGPT-4’s capabilities in precategorizing refractive surgery patients based on commonly used clinical parameters. The goal was to assess whether ChatGPT-4’s performance when categorizing batch inputs is comparable to those made by a refractive surgeon. A simple binary set of categories (patient suitable for laser refractive surgery or not) as well as a more detailed set were compared. Methods Data from 100 consecutive patients from a refractive clinic were anonymized and analyzed. Parameters included age, sex, manifest refraction, visual acuity, and various corneal measurements and indices from Scheimpflug imaging. This study compared ChatGPT-4’s performance with a clinician’s categorizations using Cohen κ coefficient, a chi-square test, a confusion matrix, accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and receiver operating characteristic area under the curve. Results A statistically significant noncoincidental accordance was found between ChatGPT-4 and the clinician’s categorizations with a Cohen κ coefficient of 0.399 for 6 categories (95% CI 0.256-0.537) and 0.610 for binary categorization (95% CI 0.372-0.792). The model showed temporal instability and response variability, however. The chi-square test on 6 categories indicated an association between the 2 raters’ distributions (χ²5=94.7, P<.001). Here, the accuracy was 0.68, precision 0.75, recall 0.68, and F1-score 0.70. For 2 categories, the accuracy was 0.88, precision 0.88, recall 0.88, F1-score 0.88, and area under the curve 0.79. Conclusions This study revealed that ChatGPT-4 exhibits potential as a precategorization tool in refractive surgery, showing promising agreement with clinician categorizations. However, its main limitations include, among others, dependency on solely one human rater, small sample size, the instability and variability of ChatGPT’s (OpenAI LP) output between iterations and nontransparency of the underlying models. The results encourage further exploration into the application of LLMs like ChatGPT-4 in health care, particularly in decision-making processes that require understanding vast clinical data. Future research should focus on defining the model’s accuracy with prompt and vignette standardization, detecting confounding factors, and comparing to other versions of ChatGPT-4 and other LLMs to pave the way for larger-scale validation and real-world implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".