The performance of ChatGPT and ERNIE Bot in surgical resident examinations.

Abstract

To assess the application of these two large language models (LLMs) for surgical resident examinations and to compare the performance of these LLMs with that of human residents. In this study, 596 questions with a total of 183,556 responses were first included from the Medical Vision World, an authoritative medical education platform across China. Both Chinese prompted and non-prompted questions were input into ChatGPT-4.0 and ERNIE Bot-4.0 to compare their performance in a Chinese question database. Additionally, we screened another 210 surgical questions with detailed response results from 43 residents to compare the performance of residents and these two LLMs. There were no significant differences in the correctness of the responses to the 596 questions with or without prompts between the two LLMs (ChatGPT-4.0: 68.96 % [without prompt], 71.14 % [with prompts], p = 0.411; ERNIE Bot-4.0: 78.36 % [without prompt], 78.86 % [with prompts], p = 0.832), but ERNIE Bot-4.0 displayed higher correctness than ChatGPT-4.0 did (with prompts: p = 0.002; without prompts: p < 0.001). For another 210 questions with prompts, the two LLMs, especially ERNIE Bot-4.0 (ranking in the top 95 % of the 43 residents' scores), significantly outperformed the residents. The performance of ERNIE Bot-4.0 was superior to that of ChatGPT-4.0 and that of residents on surgical resident examinations in a Chinese question database.