(Press-News.org)
Interpreting the fine print of a chest CT report can make or break a patient’s surgical plan, yet radiologists worldwide face ballooning workloads and widening expertise gaps. A new study from Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University analyzed 13,489 real-world chest CT reports and found that state-of-the-art LLMs can shoulder much of that burden—when asked the right way.
''We discovered that modern language models can act as a dependable second set of eyes for radiologists,'' said Dr. Peng Luo, lead author and physician at Zhujiang Hospital. ''With carefully worded multiple-choice prompts, GPT-4 reached a 75 percent accuracy rate across 13 common chest diseases, ranging from COPD to aortic atherosclerosis.''
The team compared GPT-4, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Qwen-Max, Gemini-Pro and GPT-3.5-Turbo using two question styles: open-ended and multiple choice. Across all models, multiple-choice prompts boosted accuracy and consistency, underscoring the power of prompt engineering. GPT-4, Claude-3.5 and Qwen-Max topped the charts, while GPT-3.5-Turbo and Gemini-Pro lagged.
To probe whether weaker models could catch up, the researchers fine-tuned GPT-3.5-Turbo on 200 high-performing cases. ''Fine-tuning turned a 42 percent system into a 65 percent system overnight for tough pulmonary cases,'' Dr. Luo said. ''That's a game-changer for hospitals that rely on cost-effective models.”
Beyond raw accuracy, the study evaluated each model’s area under the ROC curve (AUC) for every disease. GPT-4 excelled at gallstone and pleural effusion detection, while Qwen-Max showed unusual strength in COPD discrimination. However, no single model dominated every condition, suggesting a tailored, disease-specific deployment strategy.
The authors caution that LLM outputs still require expert oversight, especially when a model expresses high confidence in borderline cases. Future work will integrate explainable-AI tools to reveal how models weigh radiologic clues and to set dynamic confidence thresholds.
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Researchers in China have developed a powerful machine learning model that can help determine which patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) are likely to respond well to radiotherapy—a common treatment for this type of cancer. The study, conducted by scientists at Zhujiang Hospital and Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University, introduces a predictive tool known as the NPC-RSS (Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Radiotherapy Sensitivity Score).
Using transcriptomic data and a rigorous machine learning framework ...
Lung adenocarcinoma remains one of the most challenging cancers to diagnose accurately, with pathologists spending countless hours examining tissue samples under microscopes to determine cancer grades and predict patient outcomes. A new study published in the International Journal of Surgery demonstrates how generative artificial intelligence could fundamentally change this process, offering both speed and precision that rivals human expertise.
Dr. Anqi Lin and his research team at Southern Medical University's ...
New research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that prolonged and/or repeated exposure to gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) anesthetic agents (sevoflurane, propofol) for infants in the first two months of life resulted in an accelerated maturation of brain electrical activity patterns evoked by visual stimuli when recorded at 2-5 months of age, compared to infants who did not have early general anesthesia exposure. These findings may suggest the use of non-GABA-active anesthetics for the newborn ...
New measurements of fine microplastic particles suspended in the air in homes and cars suggest that humans may be inhaling far greater amounts of lung-penetrating microplastics than previously thought. Nadiia Yakovenko and colleagues at the Université de Toulouse, France, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on July 30, 2025.
Prior research has detected tiny fragments of plastic known as microplastics suspended in the air across a wide variety of outdoor and indoor environments worldwide. The ubiquity of these airborne pollutants has raised concerns about their potential health ...
Indian adults who move to cities are significantly more likely to become obese than their rural counterparts - and the longer they stay, the greater the risk
Article URL: http://plos.io/3IxoWh6
Article title: Understanding the impact of urban exposure on obesity among middle and old-age migrants in India
Author countries: India
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...
A new study of Instagram posts has uncovered strong statistical correlations suggesting that social media images may play a key role in shaping public opinion toward events, with notable social and political effects. Nafiseh Jabbari Tofighi of Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and Reda Alhajj of University of Calgary, Canada, Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on July 30, 2025.
Some prior studies have suggested that images and videos on social media can significantly impact users’ sentiments ...
Different dimensions of psychopathy might be associated with different physiological underpinnings of facial emotion recognition - and oxytocin could affect this skill - per scoping review of 66 studies
Article URL: http://plos.io/4kFtGPd
Article title: Psychophysiology of facial emotion recognition in psychopathy dimensions and oxytocin’s role: A scoping review
Author countries: Portugal, U.K.
Funding: This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia in the form of a fellowship awarded to DP (Ref. 2022.00586.CEECIND/CP1722/CT0011; DOI: 10.54499/2022.00586.CEECIND/CP1722/CT0011) and an institutional ...
A holistic approach reveals the global spectrum of knowledge on the impact of cumulative heat exposure on young students, according to an article published July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Konstantina Vasilakopoulou from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and Matthaios Santamouris from the University of New South Wales, Australia. The article aims to shed light on the social and economic inequalities caused within and across countries, the potential adaptive measures to counterbalance ...
An international survey of over 300 adults reveals that males born in summer are potentially more prone to depression than those born in other seasons, though this trend was not mirrored in female study participants.
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Article URL: https://plos.io/4525W1T
Article Title: Investigating the association between season of birth and symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults
Author Countries: Canada
Funding: This work was supported by Kwantlen Polytechnic University Student Research Innovation Grant (SRIG 2023-60 to AK). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...
Almost all animals have symmetrical bodies: If we look at the left and right halves of our body, the limbs, eyes and ears are arranged evenly along the axis that runs through the centre of our body. This bilateral symmetry is almost universal in all animals and is only very rarely broken – with exceptions like the five-armed starfish or crab species that have one large and one small claw. One example of broken bilateral symmetry is the cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis, which is native to Lake Tanganyika in Africa. Its head and especially ...
