A Twitter user said ChatGPT saved his dog’s life correctly diagnosing a blood condition veterinarians were unable to identify.
The user, who goes by Cooper on their account @peakcooper, said their border collie Sassy was diagnosed with a tick-borne disease, but that its symptoms began to worsen despite taking the prescribed treatment.
Cooper brought Sassy back to the vet, but they were unable to provide a further diagnosis and advised the only thing to do was to wait and see how the dog’s condition progressed.
Unwilling to risk Sassy’s health, Cooper decided to try entering the dog’s bloodwork into ChatGPT4 and ask the program for its diagnosis. The AI chatbot advised that it wasn’t a veterinarian, but suggested the dog’s bloodwork and symptoms indicated it could be suffering from immune mediated hemolytic anemia (IMHA).
He said he then brought that prognosis to another vet, who confirmed it and began treating the dog appropriately. Cooper said Sassy has since made a fully recovery, and said ‘ChatGPT4 saved my dog’s life.’
Sassy, Cooper’s dog which was suffering from a blood condition vets couldn’t diagnose
‘After my dog got diagnosed with a tick-borne disease, the vet started her on the proper treatment, and despite a serious anemia, her condition seemed to be improving relatively well. After a few days however, things took a turn for the worse,’ Cooper wrote on his Twitter account.
‘I noticed her gums were very pale, so we rushed back to the vet. The blood test revealed an even more severe anemia, even worse than the first day we came in. The vet ran more tests to rule out any other co-infections associated with tick-borne diseases, but came up negative.’
Cooper said the vet finally threw up his hands, and he began bringing Sassy to other vets for opinions when the idea struck him that ChatGPT might be ideal for coming up with a diagnosis.
AI programs like ChatGPT comb the internet for data which it aggregates into a communicable form. To provide a possible diagnosis for Cooper, it would have taken the information he entered and compared it to the vast medical resources available on the internet and returned the best match.
‘It occurred to me that medical diagnostics seemed like the sort of thing GPT4 could potentially be really good at, so I described the situation in great detail,’ Cooper wrote.
He said he meticulously transcribed the findings of Sassy’s bloodwork over into the program, and asked the program for its diagnosis.
In response, the program cautioned that it was not a veterinarian and advised Cooper to seek a professional opinion, but provided a prognosis nonetheless.
ChatGPT4’s diagnosis after reviewing the dog’s bloodwork infromation Cooper provided
Based on Sassy’s bloodwork and the symptoms Cooper described several conditions that could be causing the illness, including internal bleeding from injury, parasites, or infections, along with the possibility the dog was suffering from IMHA.
Cooper said internal bleeding had been ruled out by ultrasounds at the vet, leaving IMHA as the only other possibility.
‘I knew the 4DX test ruled out other coinfections, and an ultrasound ruled out internal bleeding, so that left us with one single diagnosis that fit everything so far: IMHA,’ he wrote.
When he offered IMHA as a possibility to the vet, Cooper said they ran tests and confirmed that it was what Sassy was suffering from. The dog was then placed on the appropriate treatment and made a full recovery.
‘After numerous other tests, the diagnosis was confirmed. GPT4 was right,’ Cooper wrote.
He noted that he’d worked with ChatGPT’s latest generation of its AI software -GPT4 – which was released on March 14, and that the previous generation – GPT3.5 – had been unable to provide a diagnosis.
‘GPT-3.5 couldn’t place the proper diag., but GPT4 was smart enough to do it. I can’t imagine what medical diagnostics will look like 20 years from now,’ he wrote.
‘Hopefully it’ll help other people who are having health problems with their pets,’ Cooper told DailyMail.com. He added that people should not follow the program’s advice blindly, and that they should always seek professional opinions when making decisions about their pet’s health.
