ArticleFrontiers in pediatrics2026
Cross-sectional comparative evaluation of five large language model-driven chatbots on an expert-curated 44-question set of parent-facing questions about pediatric vitamin D deficiency.
Article in Frontiers in pediatrics, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Background: Parents and caregivers increasingly use generative artificial intelligence chatbots for child health information. Pediatric vitamin D deficiency is a clinically relevant topic because advice about supplementation, testing, rickets, high-risk children, toxicity, and emergency symptoms can influence caregiver decisions. Objective: To compare the safety, medical accuracy, empathy, information reliability, educational quality, transparency, global quality, and readability of five large language model-driven chatbots when answering questions about pediatric vitamin D deficiency. Methods: This cross-sectional comparative study was reported with reference to CHART. An expert-curated 44-question set was selected from a 92-question candidate pool informed by search trends, caregiver-facing sources, clinical guidelines, and expert discussion. Each of the 44 questions was submitted once to each of five chatbot services-ChatGPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Qianwen 3.6-Plus, DeepSeek V4, and Doubao-Seed-2.0 Pro-using the same parent-oriented instruction. Responses were assessed for safety, accuracy, empathy, DISCERN, EQIP, JAMA criteria, GQS, and readability. Paired question-level differences were analyzed using Friedman tests, Kendall's Results: Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (Fleiss' kappa = 0.842 for safety; ICCs 0.846-0.914 for other subjective metrics). Twenty of 220 responses (9.1%) were unsafe; safety did not differ significantly across models (Cochran's Conclusions: In this single-run evaluation, the five chatbot services showed domain-specific performance differences without a significant safety difference. Findings are exploratory rather than evidence of stable model superiority and support multidimensional evaluation with clinician involvement for high-risk or individualized pediatric advice.
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