Microsoft researchers reported in the journal Science on October 22 that their diagnostic system solved 83.2% of 304 difficult medical cases, while general physicians working alone solved 36.1% with textbooks and online references and 22.3% without them. The cases came from teaching case reports in The New England Journal of Medicine. The system, called MAI-DxO, coordinates several AI programs that play different roles, like a panel of doctors. It never sees the whole file at once. It asks questions, orders tests and gets each answer from a separate program that releases information only when asked. On 325 emergency room cases taken from hospital records, it reached about 80% accuracy, against 47% for the physicians.

The authors list the limits of the comparison themselves. The doctors were generalists working alone, without specialists or hospital teams, and every case was a written file with no scans or tissue slides and no patient in the room. Most of the gain came from the underlying model, since OpenAI’s GPT-5 alone scored about 79%. Using standard U.S. prices, its most accurate setting spent $5,431 per case, above the $4,725 spent by physicians, while a cheaper setting reached 80.9% for $2,241. All the authors work for Microsoft. The next step is a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where patients who agree will use the system during normal care and its conclusions will be compared with their doctors’.