An auditable conditional-strategy framework for open-ended decision-making in complex lung cancer

Daoyun Wang, Zhicheng Huang, Huaiyuan Sun, Jiaqi Xu, Xiaowei Xu +37

Complex lung cancer decisions can involve several defensible pathways whose eligibility, sequencing and safety depend on unresolved information. Effective support must make explicit how patient conditions govern pathway eligibility, deferral and redirection. MedGPT Clinical Explorer (MCE) organizes alternatives, decision-changing unknowns, safety constraints and fallback into a conditional strategy for clinician review. To evaluate this representation in physician-authored strategies, multidisciplinary experts established case-specific references for 40 cases within a purposive 100-case corpus, and 250 physicians from 98 institutions produced 2,250 strategies under unaided, retrieval-reference and MCE-assisted conditions. MCE-assisted strategies expressed more applicable clinical requirements, measured by the Admissible Pathway Attainment Score (APAS; 0-100), than unaided strategies (adjusted difference, 12.87; 95% CI, 11.18-14.55) and retrieval-reference strategies (5.22; 3.52-6.93). With the same knowledge base available in the retrieval-reference and MCE-assisted conditions, the additional content centered on candidate pathways, decision-critical information and safety…