A Man with Abdominal Pain, Fever, and Hypoxemia

The first of its kind, this Case Record of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) from the New England Journal of Medicine describes a master clinician and an AI system evaluating the case of a 36-year-old man with sepsis (see Figure 1).

The master clinician (Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal) and an artificial-intelligence (AI) system (“Dr. CaBot”) — trained on all published MGH Case Records — were independently given the same complex case presentation and initial imaging. Neither had access to the other’s reasoning. In addition to a video recording of Dr. Dhaliwal’s masterful reasoning, the editors published Dr. CaBot’s verbatim discussion, including any errors, to allow readers to judge the strengths and weaknesses of AI firsthand.