Evaluating the Diagnostic and Treatment Capabilities of GPT-4 Vision in Dermatology: A Pilot Study

The integration of generative artificial intelligence within dermatology presents a new frontier for enhancing diagnostic accuracy and treatment planning.

This research evaluates Generative Pre-trained Transformer-4 Vision's (GPT-4V) performance in accurately diagnosing and generating treatment plans for common dermatological conditions, comparing its assessment of textual versus image data and its performance with multimodal inputs.

A dataset of 102 images representing 9 common dermatological conditions was compiled from dermatlas.org and dermnet.nz. Images were screened by 2 board-certified dermatologists and were excluded if they did not represent a classic presentation of the respective conditions. Fifty-four images were included in the final analysis. In addition, 9 text-based clinical scenarios corresponding to each condition were developed. GPT-4V's diagnostic capabilities were assessed across 3 setups: Image Prompt, Scenario Prompt, and Image + Scenario Prompt.

In the Image Prompt setup, GPT-4V correctly identified the primary diagnosis for 54% of the images. The Scenario Prompt and the Image + Scenario Prompt setups, respectively, both achieved an 89% accuracy rate in identifying the primary diagnosis. Treatment recommendations were evaluated using a modified Entrustment Scale, showing competent but not expert-level performance. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test demonstrated a statistically significant difference in treatment recommendations based on the Entrustment Score, with the model performing better in the Image + Scenario setup (P < .01).

GPT-4V demonstrates the potential to augment dermatological diagnosis and treatment recommendations, particularly in text-based scenarios. However, its underwhelming performance in image-based diagnosis and integration of multimodal data highlights important areas for improvement.