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Microsoft has developed a new medical AI tool, which it claims can “sequentially investigate nd solve medicine’s most complex diagnostic challenges” that even expert physicians struggle to answer.
Called “Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator”, or MAI-DxO for short, the AI-powered tool is developed by the company’s AI health unit, which was founded last year by Mustafa Suleyman. In a blog post, the tech giant said that when benchmarked against real-world case records, the new medical AI tool “correctly diagnoses up to 85% of NEJM case proceedings, a rate more than four times higher than a group of experienced physicians” while being more cost-effective.
What’s impressive is that these cases are from the New England Journal of Medicine and are very complex and require multiple specialists and tests before doctors can reach any conclusion.
In a statement to the Financial Times, the chief executive of Microsoft AI said that the new AI model was a big step towards “medical superintelligence” and could help doctors by easing their workload. Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator works by creating a virtual panel of five AI agents, each of which acts as a doctor with distinct roles like choosing diagnostic tests and coming up with hypotheses.
The tech giant said its new AI system was trained on 304 studies that described some of the most complex cases solved by doctors and used a new technique called “chain of debate”, which it says gives a step-by-step account of how the AI solves real-world problems.
For this, the company used different large language models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, xAI and DeepSeek. Microsoft said that the new AI medical tool correctly diagnosed 85.5 per cent of cases, which is way better compared to experienced human doctors, who were able to correctly diagnose only 20 per cent of the cases. One thing to note is that physicians weren’t allowed to refer to textbooks or get advice from their colleagues, something which could have improved their success rate.
Microsoft’s new experimental tool does show promising results, but before generative AI can be safely used to diagnose patients, we will need more data and regulatory frameworks in place. To do this, the tech giant said it is working with health organisations to test and validate its approach before making the tool available to healthcare specialists.
