Comparing clinical decision-making between colposcopists and large language models in cervical dysplasia management:...

This prospective multicenter study aimed to compare the decision-making abilities of board-certified colposcopists and two commercially available large language models (LLM), ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-5, in cervical dysplasia management.

Twenty-three anonymized real-life patient cases with multiple-choice (MC) questions regarding treatment decisions were used to assess answer quality. Ten board-certified colposcopists and the two LLMs addressed the MC questions. The gold standard was defined by two guideline authors. LLMs were prompted to justify their responses. Concordance rates were calculated and compared across all questions and histopathological subgroups, including cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), unspecific histopathological results, and cervical cancer cases.

Clinicians and LLMs achieved similar overall concordance rates compared to the gold standard (69.6% for clinicians, 69.6% for ChatGPT-4o, and 65.2% for ChatGPT-5). ChatGPT-5 outperformed clinicians in precancerous lesions (81.8% vs. 66.4%), while clinicians excelled in complex cases with unspecific histopathology (86% vs. 60%). Clinicians showed a tendency to overtreat low-grade lesions (CIN I), opting for more intensive surveillance. ChatGPT-4o performed better than ChatGPT-5 in cervical cancer cases, though both models struggled with these scenarios.

This study highlights the potential of LLMs as decision support tools in cervical dysplasia management, particularly for straightforward cases like precancerous lesions. However, clinicians remain superior in handling complex or ambiguous cases. The tendency of clinicians to overtreat low-grade lesions may offer the potential to test the implementation of a decision support tool for those cases. While LLMs show promise, exploring open-ended clinical scenarios and integrating retrieval-augmented generation could enhance their practical application.