Evaluating ChatGPT’s Accuracy in Responding to Patient Education Questions on Acute Kidney Injury and Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy

INTRODUCTION: Acute kidney injury (AKI) and continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) are critical areas in nephrology. The effectiveness of ChatGPT in simpler, patient education-oriented questions has not been thoroughly assessed. This study evaluates the proficiency of ChatGPT 4.0 in responding to such questions, subjected to various linguistic alterations. METHODS: Eighty-nine questions were sourced from the Mayo Clinic Handbook for educating patients on AKI and CRRT. These questions were categorized as original, paraphrased with different interrogative adverbs, paraphrased resulting in incomplete sentences, and paraphrased containing misspelled words. Two nephrologists verified the questions for medical accuracy. A χ2 test was conducted to ascertain notable discrepancies in ChatGPT 4.0's performance across these formats. RESULTS: ChatGPT provided notable accuracy in handling a variety of question formats for patient education in AKI and CRRT. Across all question types, ChatGPT demonstrated an accuracy of 97% for both original and adverb-altered questions and 98% for questions with incomplete sentences or misspellings. Specifically for AKI-related questions, the accuracy was consistently maintained at 97% for all versions. In the subset of CRRT-related questions, the tool achieved a 96% accuracy for original and adverb-altered questions, and this increased to 98% for questions with incomplete sentences or misspellings. The statistical analysis revealed no significant difference in performance across these varied question types (p value: 1.00 for AKI and 1.00 for CRRT), and there was no notable disparity between the artificial intelligence (AI)'s responses to AKI and CRRT questions (p value: 0.71). CONCLUSION: ChatGPT 4.0 demonstrates consistent and high accuracy in interpreting and responding to queries related to AKI and CRRT, irrespective of linguistic modifications. These findings suggest that ChatGPT 4.0 has the potential to be a reliable support tool in the delivery of patient education, by accurately providing information across a range of question formats. Further research is needed to explore the direct impact of AI-generated responses on patient understanding and education outcomes.