DH, age 72, was a 50 pack-year smoker until he quit about a month ago. Stubbornly resistant to medical care, he finally got a screening low-dose CT scan specifically designed for smokers and paid for by Medicare.
The scan detected some nodules in DH’s lungs plus other problems (including moderate-to-severe emphysema of the type that killed his father at age 65).
DH has since had a pulmonary function test and a PET-CT scan.
I fed the results, along with comments from his pulmonologist, into ChatGPT.
Wow! Amazing details, suggestions, references taking all of DH’s factors into account…far more than we got from the doctor. Hours of research condensed into minutes. Starting with technical as would be used by a doctor. Then the computer asks if I would like it condensed and simplified into a summary suitable for a patient. Plus questions for the patient to ask the doctor.
Extremely valuable.
DH will get a bronchoscopic biopsy of his bilateral apical nodules on 5/22/25. The right side, larger one appears to be an indolent adenocarcinoma. The left-side low-density one is < 1 cm and didn’t show up on the PET-CT but that doesn’t mean it’s benign.
Based on the references pulled together by ChatGPT it’s clear that surgery is not the best option for DH. Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT) has the same local recurrence rate as surgery and is far safer for someone with emphysema. (Surgery has a better overall survival rate but that’s probably because patients who choose radiation because they are inoperable are probably pretty sick with something else that will kill them eventually.)
I’m sold on the benefits of AI for increased productivity. The Macroeconomic impact of this technology, which has just been recently released, will surely be huge in the coming years.
Wendy