ChatGPT for the Modern Plastic Surgeon

Abstract

Plastic surgery has consistently prided itself on driving surgical and technological innovation to maximize patient outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate this, with its impending integration into medicine yielding innumerable applications. AI, however, has been difficult for clinicians to access, thereby limiting widespread adoption. ChatGPT is disrupting these barriers, as the novel AI platform developed by OpenAI represents the most publicly accessible tool of its kind. With ChatGPT continuing to captivate public attention, greater consideration of its potential impact on plastic surgery is warranted. As a natural language processing software, ChatGPT is inherently dialogistic. By analyzing extensive amounts of data and dynamically transforming them into meaningful, personalized responses to the user’s input, it can ask follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. This contrasts with typical queries of databases (eg, UpToDate) or search engines (eg, Google), where static entries of previously written compositions are presented. The functions of ChatGPT are seemingly endless. The platform can craft poetry, develop code, elucidate the intricacies of quantum mechanics, and draft a customized text message. Nevertheless, whether a domain-agnostic AI such as ChatGPT has a role in fields as specialized as plastic surgery warrants healthy skepticism. To discern its utility, researchers recently put ChatGPT to the test, asking it to complete the United States Medical Licensing Examination, where it performed at or near the passing threshold for all three portions.1 When simplifying radiology reports, ChatGPT was able to produce content that was factually correct and comprehensive.2 As ChatGPT and similar tools continue to evolve through deep learning, their performance can only be expected to improve. What role might this new, innovative tool have in plastic surgery? To first address this question, we asked the ChatGPT platform “What purpose could ChatGPT serve in plastic surgery?” Responses are outlined in Table 1. The tool could be integrated into clinical workflow to increase efficiency by performing traditionally time-consuming tasks such as generating insurance appeals letters, crafting patient education materials, and assisting clinical decision-making when presented with diagnostically challenging cases. Some physicians have already begun to incorporate ChatGPT into their practices for these purposes.3 Such efficiency-optimizing activities would enable modern surgeons to refocus time previously occupied by administrative tasks toward patient care. Table 1. - Responses of ChatGPT to the Query “What Purpose Could ChatGPT Serve in Plastic Surgery?” 1. Providing information and answering questions about plastic surgery procedures, recovery time, and potential risks and complications to patients 2. Assisting with virtual consultations by generating personalized treatment plans based on the patient’s goals and medical history 3. Generating progress reports and postoperative instructions for patients 4. Assisting in patient education, by generating education materials, brochures, and videos 5. Helping to improve efficiency and accuracy in documentation and recordkeeping in plastic surgery clinics 6. Assisting in research by generating summaries of research papers and helping researchers to identify patterns and trends in data Despite the ostensible advantages of ChatGPT, its use should be approached with caution. ChatGPT may create superficially plausible but nonetheless incorrect responses to queries, causing concern if patients direct clinical questions exclusively to the platform. In terms of ethics, the technology has spawned debate regarding its role in the production of scientific literature, with ChatGPT-generated abstracts possibly undermining the future of scientific integrity.4,5 With AI, such as ChatGPT, becoming more robust, continual reevaluation of its appropriate implementation in plastic surgery is necessary. Because AI has immense capacity to assist the broader delivery of health care, the question is not if but when AI will be used homogeneously across health care. Plastic surgeons are encouraged to develop proficiency with the technology so that when the time arises, this powerful tool can be integrated seamlessly into their practices. DISCLOSURE The authors have no financial interest to declare in relation to the content of this article. No funding was received for this work.

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