Superhuman performance in urology board questions by an explainable large language model enabled for context integration of the European Association of Urology guidelines: the UroBot study
This addresses the need for accurate and verifiable AI tools in urology clinical practice, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with domain-specific enhancements.
This study tackled the problem of outdated data and lack of explainability in medical question-answering by developing UroBot, a urology-specialized chatbot using retrieval-augmented generation with the latest guidelines, which achieved an 88.4% correct answer rate, surpassing both state-of-the-art models and urologists' average performance of 68.7%.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing medical Question-Answering (medQA) through extensive use of medical literature. However, their performance is often hampered by outdated training data and a lack of explainability, which limits clinical applicability. This study aimed to create and assess UroBot, a urology-specialized chatbot, by comparing it with state-of-the-art models and the performance of urologists on urological board questions, ensuring full clinician-verifiability. UroBot was developed using OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models, employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and the latest 2023 guidelines from the European Association of Urology (EAU). The evaluation included ten runs of 200 European Board of Urology (EBU) In-Service Assessment (ISA) questions, with performance assessed by the mean Rate of Correct Answers (RoCA). UroBot-4o achieved an average RoCA of 88.4%, surpassing GPT-4o by 10.8%, with a score of 77.6%. It was also clinician-verifiable and exhibited the highest run agreement as indicated by Fleiss' Kappa (k = 0.979). By comparison, the average performance of urologists on board questions, as reported in the literature, is 68.7%. UroBot's clinician-verifiable nature and superior accuracy compared to both existing models and urologists on board questions highlight its potential for clinical integration. The study also provides the necessary code and instructions for further development of UroBot.