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Record W4408613424 · doi:10.2196/58897

Performance of ChatGPT-4 on Taiwanese Traditional Chinese Medicine Licensing Examinations: Cross-Sectional Study

2025· article· en· W4408613424 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Liang‐Wei Tseng, Yi-Chin Lu, Li‐Chuan Tseng, Yu‐Chun Chen, Hsing‐Yu Chen

Bibliographic record

VenueJMIR Medical Education · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCross-sectional studyMedicineTraditional medicineFamily medicinePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI), notably ChatGPT, into medical education, has shown promising results in various medical fields. Nevertheless, its efficacy in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) examinations remains understudied. Objective: This study aims to (1) assess the performance of ChatGPT on the TCM licensing examination in Taiwan and (2) evaluate the model's explainability in answering TCM-related questions to determine its suitability as a TCM learning tool. Methods: We used the GPT-4 model to respond to 480 questions from the 2022 TCM licensing examination. This study compared the performance of the model against that of licensed TCM doctors using 2 approaches, namely direct answer selection and provision of explanations before answer selection. The accuracy and consistency of AI-generated responses were analyzed. Moreover, a breakdown of question characteristics was performed based on the cognitive level, depth of knowledge, types of questions, vignette style, and polarity of questions. Results: ChatGPT achieved an overall accuracy of 43.9%, which was lower than that of 2 human participants (70% and 78.4%). The analysis did not reveal a significant correlation between the accuracy of the model and the characteristics of the questions. An in-depth examination indicated that errors predominantly resulted from a misunderstanding of TCM concepts (55.3%), emphasizing the limitations of the model with regard to its TCM knowledge base and reasoning capability. Conclusions: Although ChatGPT shows promise as an educational tool, its current performance on TCM licensing examinations is lacking. This highlights the need for enhancing AI models with specialized TCM training and suggests a cautious approach to utilizing AI for TCM education. Future research should focus on model improvement and the development of tailored educational applications to support TCM learning.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.061
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.102
GPT teacher head0.484
Teacher spread0.382 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations9
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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