Wire reporting: (Reuters, via Daily Maverick)

Microsoft researchers said Thursday that an AI system designed to work through diagnoses step by step outperformed general physicians on complex case tests, according to a study published in Science^1,2,3.

The company calls the system a Diagnostic Orchestrator: multiple AI agents reason through symptoms and history, decide which questions and tests to order, and update hypotheses as results arrive, rather than scoring all available data at once^1,2,3.

The Verge reported that Microsoft compiled the cases into a benchmark it named SDBench and plans to open-source it². On scenarios drawn from hundreds of New England Journal of Medicine case reports, the system reached about 83 percent diagnostic accuracy, compared with roughly 36 percent for generalist physicians using references and 22 percent for those working without them, The Verge said².

On emergency-department cases from a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center admissions database, The Verge said the orchestrator scored 80 percent accuracy versus an average of 47 percent for physicians, and tended to reach diagnoses at a lower estimated cost². Reuters, carried by Daily Maverick and CNA, said the tool was more than twice as accurate as general physicians on more than 300 unusual cases and also beat physicians on emergency-room scenarios^1,3.

The Verge said the system is powered by OpenAI's GPT-5 and outperformed frontier models running alone, though the peer-reviewed paper does not include several newer models named in that report². Microsoft researchers told Reuters that typical medical-AI comparisons use multiple-choice exams that do not match how patients present^1,3.

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, told The Verge the work still needs clinical validation and called that a leap beyond the study². The Verge and Reuters both said Microsoft plans tests with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Reuters described emergency-department triage, while Dominic King told The Verge hospital testing would likely start in the next couple of months^1,2,3.

Microsoft has not said when or how the technology might be sold, The Verge reported, and King pointed to medicine's regulatory requirements². The study used past cases, and it is not known how the system would perform with live patients^1,2,3.

Sources

1. (Reuters, via Daily Maverick)Microsoft develops AI tool that can diagnose ‘sequentially’ like a doctorAlso (Reuters, via CNA)Oct 23, 1:11 AM
2. The VergeMicrosoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing diseasesOct 22, 2:08 PM

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