ArticleDigital health
Head-to-head evaluation of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity on acid-base disorder case clinical management and drug treatment: Accuracy, domain performance, and response consistency assessment.
Article in Digital health. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in medical education, but their performance and reliability on mechanistically demanding topics like acid-base interpretation are unclear. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional head-to-head evaluation of three LLMs (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity) using 75 textbook acid-base cases related to management and drug treatment. One obsolete case was excluded, leaving 74 vignettes (29 metabolic, 10 respiratory, 35 mixed) that generated 510 multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Each MCQ was mapped to case category, one of seven cognitive domains, and one of four distractor-based difficulty bands. All questions were posed via public web interfaces in two independent phases (Phase I and II). Primary outcome was accuracy (proportion correct); consistency outcomes were identical answers across phases and reproducibly correct answers (correct in both phases). Results: Overall accuracy was 59.8% (305/510) for ChatGPT, 58.8% (300/510) for DeepSeek, and 53.7% (274/510) for Perplexity (Cochran's Q p = 0.16); ChatGPT and DeepSeek each outperformed Perplexity (p = 0.0086 and p = 0.0374). In metabolic cases (164 items), Perplexity scored 50.6% versus 60.4% and 62.8% for ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Accuracy was highest for compensation/expected response (116 items; 70.7% for ChatGPT and DeepSeek, 62.1% for Perplexity) and lowest for metabolic acidosis subtypes (59 items; 52.5%, 42.4%, 32.2%). Accuracy declined with difficulty, with Perplexity significantly lower than the other models in moderate-hard and hard bands. Identical answers across phases occurred in 81.7% of items for ChatGPT, 81.1% for DeepSeek, and 76.1% for Perplexity, but reproducibly correct answers were 52.1%, 48.8%, and 43.2%. Conclusions: ChatGPT and DeepSeek showed moderate performance and generally higher accuracy than Perplexity. Stable repeated errors despite only moderate reproducibly correct responses support cautious interpretation of LLM outputs and argue against their use as stand-alone tools for acid-base learning or clinical decision making of management and drug treatment .
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.