Newswise — Access to healthcare is both limited and increasing in demand. Clinicians face mounting workloads and a rapid influx of complex data and protocols. Time is both scarce and crucial. A new study demonstrates that, especially in these time-sensitive situations, integrating AI into clinical workflows can significantly enhance a doctor’s capacity to diagnose and treat patients effectively—all without replacing the irreplaceable human elements of medical care.
Robotics, LLM such as ChatGPT, and virtual reality are some of the first things that come to mind when people think of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and there is often an underlying fear AI will replace professional careers and industries. But how will AI be used in science and the future of medicine? Leading researchers emphasize a unique vision where AI’s true strength lies in generating large-scale multi-omic insights to bolster, not replace, clinical expertise.
“My team and I are not trying to create a ‘robotic brain’ that reasons exactly like a human,” says Dr. Canio Martinelli, lead author of a newly published study on AI error patterns in obstetrics and gynecology, featured in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health. “Instead, we want an integrated multi-omic analysis system, essentially a powerful engine for producing valuable data, that remains in the hands of skilled medical professionals.”
Since January, the paper has ranked among the top three most frequently viewed and cited articles on SSRN, highlighting the global interest in how AI can reshape patient care. Professor Antonio Giordano, head of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) in Philadelphia and a co-author on the study, notes:
“It’s not really about whether AI ‘outperforms’ human practitioners. What matters now is how we can harness AI to inform and support better decisions done by clinicians. That synergy between advanced analytics and expert interpretation is key.”
This research focuses on mistakes and error patterns between human clinicians and large language models (LLMs), showing how AI can be strategically employed to improve outcomes. By systematically identifying error patterns, the study reveals how these tools can refine clinical training and workflows, particularly in the high-stakes or time-sensitive scenarios that healthcare providers increasingly face.
Such enhancements can have worldwide impact, especially where healthcare resources are limited or for the management of big data in time-restricted scenarios.
“This study offers critical insights toward more efficient and effective care,” says Professor Alfredo Ercoli, head of the OB-GYN Department at the University of Messina in Italy. “We shouldn’t obsess over whether AI solutions ‘beat’ humans on certain benchmarks. Let’s focus on how they can seamlessly implement new capabilities in clinical practice, complementing the art of medicine rather than overshadowing it.”
Key findings from the study show that certain AI platforms can maintain consistent decision quality even under time constraints and across different languages. Experts caution, however, that these technologies cannot and should not operate in isolation:
“AI will always need the expert interpretation of physicians to ensure results are accurate and ultimately patient-centered,” Dr. Martinelli explains. “The data and insights it provides are immensely valuable, but only if we use them to enhance medical activity in a human-focused way.”
About Sbarro Health Research Organization
The is a nonprofit charity committed to funding excellence in basic genetic research to cure and diagnose cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic illnesses and to foster the training of young doctors in a spirit of professionalism and humanism. SHRO researchers have completed research on new technologies designed to diagnose lung, ovarian, endometrial, breast and brain tumors as well as lymphomas. Their work with gene therapy has also led to new strategies to treat tumors of the lung and brain, and has led to over twenty patents. SHRO relies on grants and private donations to fund important biomedical research. SHRO is dedicated to supporting scientific research aimed at finding cures for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases by identifying their underlying molecular mechanisms. SHRO includes the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine located at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and an SHRO affiliated laboratory located at the University of Siena in Siena, Italy. Over 200 SHRO molecular biologists, geneticists, physicists, and chemists work to develop new methods to understand, diagnose and cure disease.
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