After seeing 17 different doctors, boy with rare condition receives diagnosis from ChatGPT
A little boy named Alex saw 17 different doctors over the course of three years, unable to find a root cause of his chronic pain. At her wit’s end, his mom, Courtney, fed his radiology report into ChatGPT and produced immediate answers.
“I went line by line of everything that was in his (MRI notes) and plugged it into ChatGPT,” she told Today in an article published Sept. 11. “I put the note in there about ... how he wouldn’t sit crisscross applesauce. To me, that was a huge trigger (that) a structural thing could be wrong.”
The program landed on tethered cord syndrome as the likely diagnosis, leading mom to join a Facebook group for families of children with the condition. She scheduled an appointment with a neurosurgeon who, after looking at the MRI scans, agreed with ChatGPT’s prognosis.
“She said point blank, ‘Here’s occulta spina bifida, and here’s where the spine is tethered,” Courtney, who asked not to use her last name to protect the family’s privacy, told the news website.
Following the diagnosis, Alex underwent surgery to fix his tethered cord syndrome and is currently recovering.
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Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.