Artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT diagnosed patients rushed to emergency at least as well as doctors and in some cases outperformed them, Dutch researchers have found, saying AI could "revolutionize the medical field".

But the report published Wednesday also stressed ER doctors needn't hang up their scrubs just yet, with the chatbot potentially able to speed up diagnosis but not replace human medical judgment and experience.

Scientists examined 30 cases treated in emergency service in the Netherlands in 2022, feeding in anonymized patient history, lab tests, and the doctors' own observations to ChatGPT, asking it to provide five possible diagnoses.

They then compared the chatbot's shortlist to the same five diagnoses suggested by ER doctors with access to the same information, and then cross-checked with the correct diagnosis in each case.

Doctors had the correct diagnosis in the top five in 87 percent of cases, compared to 97 percent for ChatGPT version 3.5 and 87 percent for version 4.0.

"Simply put, this indicates that ChatGPT was able to suggest medical diagnoses much like a human doctor would," said Hidde ten Berg, from the emergency medicine department at the Netherlands' Jeroen Bosch Hospital.

Co-author Steef Kurstjens told AFP the survey did not indicate that computers could one day be running the ER, but that AI can play a vital role in assisting under-pressure medics.

"The key point is that the chatbot doesn't replace the physician but it can help in providing a diagnosis and it can maybe come up with ideas the doctor hasn't thought of," Kurstjens told AFP.

Large language models such as ChatGPT are not designed as medical devices, he stressed, and there would also be privacy concerns about feeding confidential and sensitive medical data into a chatbot.

'Bloopers' 

And as in other fields, ChatGPT showed some limitations.

The chatbot's reasoning was "at times medically implausible or inconsistent, which can lead to misinformation or incorrect diagnosis, with significant implications," the report noted.