Chatbot-like AI tool to locate brain damage after stroke

Chatbot-like AI tool to locate brain damage after stroke unknown

Not everyone with stroke has access to brain scans or neurologists, so we wanted to determine whether GPT-4 could accurately locate brain lesions after stroke based on a person’s health history and a neurologic examJung-Hyun Lee

A neurologic exam can help locate lesions that result from damage to the brain tissue from a stroke, when paired with a review of a person’s health history. The exam involves symptom evaluation and thinking and memory tests. “Not everyone with stroke has access to brain scans or neurologists, so we wanted to determine whether GPT-4 could accurately locate brain lesions after stroke based on a person’s health history and a neurologic exam,” said study author Jung-Hyun Lee, MD, of State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. 

The study used 46 published cases of people who had stroke. Researchers gathered text from participants’ health histories and neurologic exams. The raw text was fed into GPT-4. Researchers asked it to answer three questions: whether a participant had one or more lesions; on which side of the brain lesions were located; and in which region of the brain the lesions were found. They repeated these questions for each participant three times. Results from GPT-4 were then compared to brain scans for each participant. 

Researchers found that GPT-4 processed the text from the health histories and neurologic exams to locate lesions in many participants’ brains, identifying which side of the brain the lesion was on, as well as the specific brain region, with the exception of lesions in the cerebellum and spinal cord. For the majority of people, GPT-4 was able to identify on which side of the brain lesions were found with a sensitivity of 74% and a specificity of 87%. It also identified the brain region with a sensitivity of 85% and a specificity of 94%.