Assessing the Performance of ChatGPT in Medical Biochemistry Using Clinical Case Vignettes: Observational Study

BACKGROUND: ChatGPT has gained global attention recently owing to its high performance in generating a wide range of information and retrieving any kind of data instantaneously. ChatGPT has also been tested for the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) and has successfully cleared it. Thus, its usability in medical education is now one of the key discussions worldwide. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of ChatGPT in medical biochemistry using clinical case vignettes. METHODS: The performance of ChatGPT was evaluated in medical biochemistry using 10 clinical case vignettes. Clinical case vignettes were randomly selected and inputted in ChatGPT along with the response options. We tested the responses for each clinical case twice. The answers generated by ChatGPT were saved and checked using our reference material. RESULTS: ChatGPT generated correct answers for 4 questions on the first attempt. For the other cases, there were differences in responses generated by ChatGPT in the first and second attempts. In the second attempt, ChatGPT provided correct answers for 6 questions and incorrect answers for 4 questions out of the 10 cases that were used. But, to our surprise, for case 3, different answers were obtained with multiple attempts. We believe this to have happened owing to the complexity of the case, which involved addressing various critical medical aspects related to amino acid metabolism in a balanced approach. CONCLUSIONS: According to the findings of our study, ChatGPT may not be considered an accurate information provider for application in medical education to improve learning and assessment. However, our study was limited by a small sample size (10 clinical case vignettes) and the use of the publicly available version of ChatGPT (version 3.5). Although artificial intelligence (AI) has the capability to transform medical education, we emphasize the validation of such data produced by such AI systems for correctness and dependability before it could be implemented in practice.