Documentation burden is a major contributor to clinician burnout, which is rising nationally and is an urgent threat to our ability to care for patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such ...as ChatGPT, could reduce clinician burden by assisting with documentation. Although many hospitals are actively integrating such systems into electronic medical record systems, AI chatbots utility and impact on clinical decision-making have not been studied for this intended use. We are the first to examine the utility of large language models in assisting clinicians draft responses to patient questions. In our two-stage cross-sectional study, 6 oncologists responded to 100 realistic synthetic cancer patient scenarios and portal messages developed to reflect common medical situations, first manually, then with AI assistance. We find AI-assisted responses were longer, less readable, but provided acceptable drafts without edits 58% of time. AI assistance improved efficiency 77% of time, with low harm risk (82% safe). However, 7.7% unedited AI responses could severely harm. In 31% cases, physicians thought AI drafts were human-written. AI assistance led to more patient education recommendations, fewer clinical actions than manual responses. Results show promise for AI to improve clinician efficiency and patient care through assisting documentation, if used judiciously. Monitoring model outputs and human-AI interaction remains crucial for safe implementation.
This paper presents an overview of the second edition of the HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) challenge, organized as a satellite event of the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing ...and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021. The challenge is composed of three tasks related to the automatic analysis of PET/CT images for patients with Head and Neck cancer (H&N), focusing on the oropharynx region. Task 1 is the automatic segmentation of H&N primary Gross Tumor Volume (GTVt) in FDG-PET/CT images. Task 2 is the automatic prediction of Progression Free Survival (PFS) from the same FDG-PET/CT. Finally, Task 3 is the same as Task 2 with ground truth GTVt annotations provided to the participants. The data were collected from six centers for a total of 325 images, split into 224 training and 101 testing cases. The interest in the challenge was highlighted by the important participation with 103 registered teams and 448 result submissions. The best methods obtained a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.7591 in the first task, and a Concordance index (C-index) of 0.7196 and 0.6978 in Tasks 2 and 3, respectively. In all tasks, simplicity of the approach was found to be key to ensure generalization performance. The comparison of the PFS prediction performance in Tasks 2 and 3 suggests that providing the GTVt contour was not crucial to achieve best results, which indicates that fully automatic methods can be used. This potentially obviates the need for GTVt contouring, opening avenues for reproducible and large scale radiomics studies including thousands potential subjects.
We conducted a literature-based meta-analysis of the risk of cardiovascular toxicities associated with MEK inhibitors.
Eligible trials included randomized phase II and III trials of patients with ...cancer who were given a mitogen activated protein (MAP)/extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) kinase (MEK) inhibitor (trametinib, selumetinib, or cobimetinib) and that described events of hypertension and decreased ejection fraction.
Our search strategy yielded 300 potentially relevant citations from PubMed/MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. After ineligible studies were excluded, a total of 10 clinical trials were considered eligible for the meta-analysis. The relative risk for all grades of hypertension was 1.54 (95% CI, 1.02 to 2.32;
= .05), 1.85 (95% CI, 1.01 to 3.40;
= .05) for high-grade hypertension, and 4.92 (95% CI, 2.93 to 8.25;
< .001) for decreased ejection fraction. Subgroup analysis revealed no difference between trametinib and selumetinib for risk of hypertension.
Our meta-analysis demonstrated that MEK inhibitor-based treatment is associated with an increased risk of all-grade and high-grade hypertension and asymptomatic decrease in ejection fraction. Clinicians should be aware of this risk and perform regular assessment.