Unveiling the clinical incapabilities: a benchmarking study of GPT-4V(ision) for ophthalmic multimodal image analysis

To evaluate the capabilities and incapabilities of a GPT-4V(ision)-based chatbot in interpreting ocular multimodal images.

We developed a digital ophthalmologist app using GPT-4V and evaluated its performance with a dataset (60 images, 60 ophthalmic conditions, 6 modalities) that included slit-lamp, scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, fundus photography of the posterior pole (FPP), optical coherence tomography, fundus fluorescein angiography and ocular ultrasound images. The chatbot was tested with ten open-ended questions per image, covering examination identification, lesion detection, diagnosis and decision support. The responses were manually assessed for accuracy, usability, safety and diagnosis repeatability. Auto-evaluation was performed using sentence similarity and GPT-4-based auto-evaluation.

Out of 600 responses, 30.6% were accurate, 21.5% were highly usable and 55.6% were deemed as no harm. GPT-4V performed best with slit-lamp images, with 42.0%, 38.5% and 68.5% of the responses being accurate, highly usable and no harm, respectively. However, its performance was weaker in FPP images, with only 13.7%, 3.7% and 38.5% in the same categories. GPT-4V correctly identified 95.6% of the imaging modalities and showed varying accuracies in lesion identification (25.6%), diagnosis (16.1%) and decision support (24.0%). The overall repeatability of GPT-4V in diagnosing ocular images was 63.3% (38/60). The overall sentence similarity between responses generated by GPT-4V and human answers is 55.5%, with Spearman correlations of 0.569 for accuracy and 0.576 for usability.

GPT-4V currently is not yet suitable for clinical decision-making in ophthalmology. Our study serves as a benchmark for enhancing ophthalmic multimodal models.