AI Chatbots Answer Gastric Cancer Questions but Struggle to Spot It in Endoscopy Images

Large language models including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini and Grok can answer written clinical questions about early gastric cancer with reasonable quality, but they perform poorly and inconsistently when asked to recognise the disease in static endoscopic images, according to a study published in BMC Gastroenterology.

For the text evaluation, they developed 40 clinical questions on early gastric cancer together with 50 single-choice questions based on clinical guidelines.

These results indicate that, for guideline-based clinical questions, the leading chatbots already produce answers that human raters judge to be largely accurate, relevant and understandable to both clinicians and patients.

The authors conclude that large language models show potential in addressing clinical questions related to early gastric cancer, but their ability to recognise the disease in static multimodal endoscopy images is limited and their effectiveness is inconsistent.

Comparison of large language models in answering early gastric cancer clinical problems and recognizing multimodal endoscopic images.