Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks

In this cross-sectional study of 21 LLMs, frontier LLMs achieved high accuracy on final diagnoses but performed poorly in generating differential diagnoses and navigating uncertainty relative to other reasoning stages. The PrIME-LLM framework provided greater separation than raw accuracy, revealing critical reasoning gaps obscured by traditional benchmarks. Thus, despite version-based improvements and advantages in reasoning-optimized models, off-the-shelf LLMs have not yet achieved the intelligence required for safe deployment and remain limited in demonstrating advanced clinical reasoning.