Clinical Reasoning
The cognitive process by which a clinician moves from patient data to diagnosis and treatment decisions.
Clinical reasoning is how a physician takes a set of symptoms, history, exam findings, and test results and narrows them to a working diagnosis and an action plan. It combines pattern recognition (fast, heuristic) with systematic differential-diagnosis analysis (slow, deliberate). The hard part is managing uncertainty: findings conflict, diseases overlap, and errors compound. It is the core professional skill that medical education tries to build and that AI benchmarks use as a proxy for whether a model is clinically useful.
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Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician
When this study reached peer review, one word vanished from its own title — and the data explains why.
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