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Ophthalmological Question Answering and Reasoning Using OpenAI o1 vs Other Large Language Models

2025· article· en· W4412791970 on OpenAlex
Sahana Srinivasan, X. C. Ai, Minjie Zou, Ke Zou, Hyunjae Kim, Thaddaeus Wai Soon Lo, Krithi Pushpanathan, Jocelyn Hui Lin Goh, Yiming Kong, Anran Li, Maxwell Singer, Kai Jin, Fares Antaki, David Ziyou Chen, Dianbo Liu, Ron A. Adelman, Qingyu Chen, Yih Chung Tham

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJAMA Ophthalmology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Canadian institutionsArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Canada)
FundersU.S. National Library of Medicine
KeywordsMetric (unit)MedicineMacroArtificial intelligenceNatural language processingMachine learningComputer scienceOperations management

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Importance: OpenAI's recent large language model (LLM) o1 has dedicated reasoning capabilities, but it remains untested in specialized medical fields like ophthalmology. Evaluating o1 in ophthalmology is crucial to determine whether its general reasoning can meet specialized needs or if domain-specific LLMs are warranted. Objective: To assess the performance and reasoning ability of OpenAI's o1 compared with other LLMs on ophthalmological questions. Design, Setting, and Participants: In September through October 2024, the LLMs o1, GPT-4o (OpenAI), GPT-4 (OpenAI), GPT-3.5 (OpenAI), Llama 3-8B (Meta), and Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google) were evaluated on 6990 standardized ophthalmology questions from the Medical Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MedMCQA) dataset. The study did not analyze human participants. Main Outcomes and Measures: Models were evaluated on performance (accuracy and macro F1 score) and reasoning abilities (text-generation metrics: Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation [ROUGE-L], BERTScore, BARTScore, AlignScore, and Metric for Evaluation of Translation With Explicit Ordering [METEOR]). Mean scores are reported for o1, while mean differences (Δ) from o1's scores are reported for other models. Expert qualitative evaluation of o1 and GPT-4o responses assessed usefulness, organization, and comprehensibility using 5-point Likert scales. Results: The LLM o1 achieved the highest accuracy (mean, 0.877; 95% CI, 0.870 to 0.885) and macro F1 score (mean, 0.877; 95% CI, 0.869 to 0.884) (P < .001). In BERTScore, GPT-4o (Δ = 0.012; 95% CI, 0.012 to 0.013) and GPT-4 (Δ = 0.014; 95% CI, 0.014 to 0.015) outperformed o1 (P < .001). Similarly, in AlignScore, GPT-4o (Δ = 0.019; 95% CI, 0.016 to 0.021) and GPT-4 (Δ = 0.024; 95% CI, 0.021 to 0.026) again performed better (P < .001). In ROUGE-L, GPT-4o (Δ = 0.018; 95% CI, 0.017 to 0.019), GPT-4 (Δ = 0.026; 95% CI, 0.025 to 0.027), and GPT-3.5 (Δ = 0.008; 95% CI, 0.007 to 0.009) all outperformed o1 (P < .001). Conversely, o1 led in BARTScore (mean, -4.787; 95% CI, -4.813 to -4.762; P < .001) and METEOR (mean, 0.221; 95% CI, 0.218 to 0.223; P < .001 except GPT-4o). Also, o1 outperformed GPT-4o in usefulness (o1: mean, 4.81; 95% CI, 4.73 to 4.89; GPT-4o: mean, 4.53; 95% CI, 4.40 to 4.65; P < .001) and organization (o1: mean, 4.83; 95% CI, 4.75 to 4.90; GPT-4o: mean, 4.63; 95% CI, 4.51 to 4.74; P = .003). Conclusions and Relevance: This study found that o1 excelled in accuracy but showed inconsistencies in text-generation metrics, trailing GPT-4o and GPT-4; expert reviews found o1's responses to be more clinically useful and better organized than GPT-4o. While o1 demonstrated promise, its performance in addressing ophthalmology-specific challenges is not fully optimal, underscoring the potential need for domain-specialized LLMs and targeted evaluations.

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.

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)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.518
Threshold uncertainty score0.565

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.123
GPT teacher head0.458
Teacher spread0.335 · 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