Burt Rosen uses GPT to understand his scan reports. Here's how.

Clarity is power. To this guy who has cancer, that matters

Burt Rosen (LinkedIn, Threads) is a marketing guy, a mensch, and a former board member of the Society for Participatory Medicine. And, in his words, Burt happens to have two cancers: kidney cancer and NETs (neuroendocrine tumors). He’s got a strong positive attitude, so he’s determined to do what he can to influence his situation. That means exploring how AI can help him understand his situation.

He does this partly because knowing what’s going on takes away some of the fear and uncertainty, and partly because he just wants to know what’s going on. That’s called being an engaged patient, right?

So he blogs, at Adventures With NETs. His latest post is about using ChatGPT to understand his radiology reports:

For fun, I was wondering how it would do interpreting my scans in case my scan appointments and doctor visits are far apart. I cut and pasted my last CT Scan report and uploaded it and asked for an English explanation. It was dead on and easy to understand.

Voilá! He blogged the radiology report before and after GPT:

How he did it (his prompt):

If you’re new to AI this might all seem mysterious, so on this blog I’m trying to teach some how-to’s. Here is literally all Burt told it:

if i upload CT Scan results can you translate into english what the report says so I understand it?

And then he copy-pasted the text of the radiology report. That’s all. And it spit out the simplified interpretation.

Clarity is power - this is empowering!

I did something similar a year ago - I pasted in my entire visit note from a doctor visit. Here’s my whole blog post about it, with the complete before and after, and here’s the simple prompt I used:

Please read this visit note from my recent doctor visit and produce a summary of my current problems, and a list of action items.

The first result wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I extended the conversation: I asked GPT to improve it in various ways, and look at the result! Here’s an excerpt of its summary:

Remember: using an LLM to simplify medical lingo is convenient and it can be useful but it is not certified medical advice, not at all. It’s exactly the sort of plain-English answer you might get if you handed the report to a medical friend: it’s an interpretation, to tide you over until you see the doc.

Bottom line takeaway:

Clarity is power.
Not knowing what’s going on can make you feel powerless and even dumb.
A good AI prompt can help you understand.

.Give it a try!