Performance of Foundation Models vs Physicians in Textual and Multimodal Ophthalmological Questions
Results of this cross-sectional study suggest that for textual questions, current FMs exhibited notable improvements in ophthalmological knowledge reasoning when compared with older LLMs and ophthalmology trainees, with performance comparable with that of expert ophthalmologists. These models demonstrated potential for medical assistance for answering ophthalmological textual queries, but their multimodal abilities remain limited. Further research or fine-tuning models with diverse ophthalmic multimodal data may lead to more capable applications with multimodal functionalities.
Authors
- Matthew Azzopardi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8571-2503)
- Marcus Ang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3022-0795)
- Darren Shu Jeng Ting (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1081-1141)
- Saaeha Rauz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4627-3496)
- Arun James Thirunavukarasu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8968-4768)
- Yin‐Hsi Chang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1274-0706)
- Sean X. Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5314-2676)
- Daniel Shu Wei Ting (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2264-7174)
- Andrew Malem
- Anna V. Song (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1874-3326)
- Benjamin Kye Jyn Tan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9411-6164)
- Jodhbir S. Mehta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6362-4898)
- Shiao Wei Wong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4318-5984)
- Humberto Rocha (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5981-4469)
- Yu Jeat Chong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8798-066X)
- Yee Ling Wong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6109-8836)
- Nikhil Jain (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2503-3306)
- Ting Fang Tan
Institutions
- Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (GB)
- University of Nottingham (GB)
- Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (GB)
- Singapore General Hospital (SG)
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Singapore National Eye Center (SG)
- Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GB)
- Luton and Dunstable University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (GB)
- Manchester Royal Eye Hospital (GB)
- Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (TW)
- Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (US)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (GB)
- Singapore Eye Research Institute (SG)
- Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre (GB)
- Duke-NUS Medical School (SG)
- Moorfields Eye Hospital (GB)
- Centre for Inflammation Research (GB)
- University College London (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- JAMA Ophthalmology
- Published
- 2025-11-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2025.4255
- Primary Topic
- Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00