aiqbench analysis
In a direct comparison of clinical literature summarization, expert-written syntheses were consistently preferred over outputs from state-of-the-art LLMs (Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama 3.1) when evaluated by blinded headache specialists. While experts found it difficult to distinguish between human and AI authorship, the study highlights that current AI models still fall short on specific criteria valued by clinicians, such as nuanced clinical utility and completeness. This finding suggests that while RAG-based agentic frameworks offer a viable alternative, significant refinement is needed before AI can fully replace expert synthesis in high-stakes medical decision-making contexts.
Ten Headache Specialists versus Artificial Intelligence for Clinical Literature Summarization: A Critical Evaluation and Comparison
arXiv:2606.05436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Summarizing the latest medical literature to guide clinical decision-making is essential for evidence-based medicine and high-quality patient care. Yet clinicians face increasing challenges due to limited time with patients and a rapidly growing volume of published articles. Although retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical summarization, human evaluations of their effectiveness in synthesizing broader scientific literature and direct comparisons to expert-written syntheses remain scarce. We constructed a RAG-based agentic AI framework using three state-of-the-art LLMs: Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama 3.1. A headache specialist created 13 questions, three for prompt optimization and ten for evaluation. Ten headache specialists across the United States and Canada each wrote a summary for one question, yielding four summaries per question (expert, Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama). The experts, blinded to authorship, critically evaluated the summaries, excluding the topic for which they wrote a summary, based on correctness, completeness, conciseness, and clinical utility, scoring each from 1 to 10 using standardized rubrics. They also ranked the summaries by preference and indicated whether they believed each summary was written by an expert or an LLM. Our study, comparing LLM- and expert-written literature summaries evaluated by headache specialists, showed that expert-written summaries were preferred, although experts sometimes found it challenging to distinguish between human- and AI-generated summaries. We also identified key expert-valued features beyond standard evaluation metrics that can guide future refinement of both human and AI literature summarization pipelines.
Authors:Alejandro Lozano, Keiko Ihara, Ping-Hao Yang, Carrie E. Robertson, Jennifer Stern, Allan Purdy, Hsiangkuo Yuan, Pengfei Zhang, Yulia Orlova, Olga Fermo, Jennifer Hranilovich, Fred Cohen, Todd J. Schwedt, Jenelle A. Jindal, Serena Yeung-Levy, Chia-Chun Chiang
Abstract:Summarizing the latest medical literature to guide clinical decision-making is essential for evidence-based medicine and high-quality patient care. Yet clinicians face increasing challenges due to limited time with patients and a rapidly growing volume of published articles. Although retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical summarization, human evaluations of their effectiveness in synthesizing broader scientific literature and direct comparisons to expert-written syntheses remain scarce. We constructed a RAG-based agentic AI framework using three state-of-the-art LLMs: Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama 3.1. A headache specialist created 13 questions, three for prompt optimization and ten for evaluation. Ten headache specialists across the United States and Canada each wrote a summary for one question, yielding four summaries per question (expert, Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Llama). The experts, blinded to authorship, critically evaluated the summaries, excluding the topic for which they wrote a summary, based on correctness, completeness, conciseness, and clinical utility, scoring each from 1 to 10 using standardized rubrics. They also ranked the summaries by preference and indicated whether they believed each summary was written by an expert or an LLM. Our study, comparing LLM- and expert-written literature summaries evaluated by headache specialists, showed that expert-written summaries were preferred, although experts sometimes found it challenging to distinguish between human- and AI-generated summaries. We also identified key expert-valued features beyond standard evaluation metrics that can guide future refinement of both human and AI literature summarization pipelines.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
arXiv:2606.05436 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2606.05436v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05436 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 294 words
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