Multimodal Large Language Model Passes Specialty Board Examination and Surpasses Human Test-Taker Scores: A Comparative Analysis Examining the Stepwise Impact of Model Prompting Strategies on Performance

ABSTRACT Background Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in answering medical licensing examination-style questions. However, there is limited research on the performance of multimodal LLMs on subspecialty medical examinations. Our study benchmarks the performance of multimodal LLM’s enhanced by model prompting strategies on gastroenterology subspeciality examination-style questions and examines how these prompting strategies incrementally improve overall performance. Methods We used the 2022 American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) self-assessment examination (N=300). This test is typically completed by gastroenterology fellows and established gastroenterologists preparing for the gastroenterology subspeciality board examination. We employed a sequential implementation of model prompting strategies: prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), five-shot learning, and an LLM-powered answer validation revision model (AVRM). GPT-4 and Gemini Pro were tested. Results Implementing all prompting strategies improved the overall score of GPT-4 from 60.3% to 80.7% and Gemini Pro’s from 48.0% to 54.3%. GPT-4’s score surpassed the 70% passing threshold and 75% average human test-taker scores unlike Gemini Pro. Stratification of questions by difficulty showed the accuracy of both LLMs mirrored that of human examinees, demonstrating higher accuracy as human test-taker accuracy increased. The addition of the AVRM to prompt, RAG and 5-shot increased GPT-4’s accuracy by 4.4%. The incremental addition of model prompting strategies improved accuracy for both non-image (57.2% to 80.4%) and image-based (63.0% to 80.9%) questions for GPT-4, but not Gemini Pro. Conclusions Our results underscore the value of model prompting strategies in improving LLM performance on subspecialty-level licensing exam questions. We also present a novel implementation of an LLM-powered reviewer model in the context of subspecialty medicine which further improved model performance when combined with other prompting strategies. Our findings highlight the potential future role of multimodal LLMs, particularly with the implementation of multiple model prompting strategies, as clinical decision support systems in subspecialty care for healthcare providers.