NEJM AI最新文献

Hospital quality measures are a vital component of a learning health system, yet they can be costly to report, statistically underpowered, and inconsistent due to poor interrater reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on health care-related tasks and offer a promising way to provide accurate abstraction of complete charts at scale. To evaluate this approach, we deployed an LLM-based system that ingests Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources data and outputs a completed Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock Management Bundle (SEP-1) abstraction. We tested the system on a sample of 100 manual SEP-1 abstractions that University of California San Diego Health reported to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2022. The LLM system achieved agreement with manual abstractors on the measure category assignment in 90 of the abstractions (90%; κ=0.82; 95% confidence interval, 0.71 to 0.92). Expert review of the 10 discordant cases identified four that were mistakes introduced by manual abstraction. This pilot study suggests that LLMs using interoperable electronic health record data may perform accurate abstractions for complex quality measures. (Funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [1R42AI177108-1] and others.).

Background: Using artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret chest X-rays (CXRs) could support accessible triage tests for active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in resource-constrained settings.

Methods: The performance of two cloud-based CXR AI systems - one to detect TB and the other to detect CXR abnormalities - in a population with a high TB and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) burden was evaluated. We recruited 1978 adults who had TB symptoms, were close contacts of known TB patients, or were newly diagnosed with HIV at three clinical sites. The TB-detecting AI (TB AI) scores were converted to binary using two thresholds: a high-sensitivity threshold and an exploratory threshold designed to resemble radiologist performance. Ten radiologists reviewed images for signs of TB, blinded to the reference standard. Primary analysis measured AI detection noninferiority to radiologist performance. Secondary analysis evaluated AI detection as compared with the World Health Organization (WHO) targets (90% sensitivity, 70% specificity). Both used an absolute margin of 5%. The abnormality-detecting AI (abnormality AI) was evaluated for noninferiority to a high-sensitivity target suitable for triaging (90% sensitivity, 50% specificity).

Results: Of the 1910 patients analyzed, 1827 (96%) had conclusive TB status, of which 649 (36%) were HIV positive and 192 (11%) were TB positive. The TB AI's sensitivity and specificity were 87% and 70%, respectively, at the high-sensitivity threshold and 78% and 82%, respectively, at the balanced threshold. Radiologists' mean sensitivity was 76% and mean specificity was 82%. At the high-sensitivity threshold, the TB AI was noninferior to average radiologist sensitivity (P<0.001) but not to average radiologist specificity (P=0.99) and was higher than the WHO target for specificity but not sensitivity. At the balanced threshold, the TB AI was comparable to radiologists. The abnormality AI's sensitivity and specificity were 97% and 79%, respectively, with both meeting the prespecified targets.

Conclusions: The CXR TB AI was noninferior to radiologists for active pulmonary TB triaging in a population with a high TB and HIV burden. Neither the TB AI nor the radiologists met WHO recommendations for sensitivity in the study population. AI can also be used to detect other CXR abnormalities in the same population.