High-quality triage and diagnosis of gynecological diseases via artificial intelligence

Timely detection and diagnosis of diseases are key elements of an efficient healthcare system. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has played an increasingly important role in improving the accuracy and efficiency of disease diagnosis in clinical practice. However, most existing AI systems for disease diagnosis have focused on either classifying patients into broad disease categories or diagnosing a specific disease, leaving a gap in the development of a coherent AI system for both triage and diagnosis in a department of a general hospital. In this study, we fill this gap with SmartGyne, an advanced AI system that can achieve high-quality triage and diagnosis for a full spectrum of gynecological diseases. By extracting useful clinical evidence for diagnosis from a large amount of electronic medical records, SmartGyne establishes an effective framework to integrate real-world clinical evidence and knowledge into a coherent AI system that can effectively handle a full spectrum of complex diseases in a department of a general hospital. Validation experiments demonstrated that SmartGyne achieved an overall accuracy of 80.1 % in triage for gynecological diseases, and 99.4 % in diagnosis for a gynecological subspecialty. In comparison with human physicians, SmartGyne showed competitive triage and diagnostic performance, and improved consultation efficiency and accuracy for physicians with limited specialized experience. These results show that SmartGyne achieves high-quality triage and diagnosis, holding the potential to improve the efficiency of the healthcare system in China, as well as other countries lacking professional gynecologists. • SmartGyne: the first AI system enabling triage and diagnosis in gynecology. • SmartGyne has 80.1 % triage and 99.4 % diagnostic accuracy in gynecological disease. • Novel NLP module processes Chinese EMRs to build knowledge graphs in gynecology. • Hierarchical disease classification combines clinic evidence with medical knowledge. • AI-assisted diagnosis boosts diagnostic accuracy of physicians from 16 % to 100 %.