Performance of GPT-5 Frontier Models in Ophthalmology Question Answering

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Main Authors: Antaki, Fares, Mikhail, David, Milad, Daniel, Mammo, Danny A, Sharma, Sumit, Srivastava, Sunil K, Chen, Bing Yu, Touma, Samir, Sevgi, Mertcan, El-Khoury, Jonathan, Keane, Pearse A, Chen, Qingyu, Tham, Yih Chung, Duval, Renaud
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Antaki, Fares
Mikhail, David
Milad, Daniel
Mammo, Danny A
Sharma, Sumit
Srivastava, Sunil K
Chen, Bing Yu
Touma, Samir
Sevgi, Mertcan
El-Khoury, Jonathan
Keane, Pearse A
Chen, Qingyu
Tham, Yih Chung
Duval, Renaud
author_facet Antaki, Fares
Mikhail, David
Milad, Daniel
Mammo, Danny A
Sharma, Sumit
Srivastava, Sunil K
Chen, Bing Yu
Touma, Samir
Sevgi, Mertcan
El-Khoury, Jonathan
Keane, Pearse A
Chen, Qingyu
Tham, Yih Chung
Duval, Renaud
contents Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-5 integrate advanced reasoning capabilities that may improve performance on complex medical question-answering tasks. For this latest generation of reasoning models, the configurations that maximize both accuracy and cost-efficiency have yet to be established. We evaluated 12 configurations of OpenAI's GPT-5 series (three model tiers across four reasoning effort settings) alongside o1-high, o3-high, and GPT-4o, using 260 closed-access multiple-choice questions from the American Academy of Ophthalmology Basic Clinical Science Course (BCSC) dataset. The primary outcome was multiple-choice accuracy; secondary outcomes included head-to-head ranking via a Bradley-Terry model, rationale quality assessment using a reference-anchored, pairwise LLM-as-a-judge framework, and analysis of accuracy-cost trade-offs using token-based cost estimates. GPT-5-high achieved the highest accuracy (0.965; 95% CI, 0.942-0.985), outperforming all GPT-5-nano variants (P < .001), o1-high (P = .04), and GPT-4o (P < .001), but not o3-high (0.958; 95% CI, 0.931-0.981). GPT-5-high ranked first in both accuracy (1.66x stronger than o3-high) and rationale quality (1.11x stronger than o3-high). Cost-accuracy analysis identified several GPT-5 configurations on the Pareto frontier, with GPT-5-mini-low offering the most favorable low-cost, high-performance balance. These results benchmark GPT-5 on a high-quality ophthalmology dataset, demonstrate the influence of reasoning effort on accuracy, and introduce an autograder framework for scalable evaluation of LLM-generated answers against reference standards in ophthalmology.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Performance of GPT-5 Frontier Models in Ophthalmology Question Answering
Antaki, Fares
Mikhail, David
Milad, Daniel
Mammo, Danny A
Sharma, Sumit
Srivastava, Sunil K
Chen, Bing Yu
Touma, Samir
Sevgi, Mertcan
El-Khoury, Jonathan
Keane, Pearse A
Chen, Qingyu
Tham, Yih Chung
Duval, Renaud
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-5 integrate advanced reasoning capabilities that may improve performance on complex medical question-answering tasks. For this latest generation of reasoning models, the configurations that maximize both accuracy and cost-efficiency have yet to be established. We evaluated 12 configurations of OpenAI's GPT-5 series (three model tiers across four reasoning effort settings) alongside o1-high, o3-high, and GPT-4o, using 260 closed-access multiple-choice questions from the American Academy of Ophthalmology Basic Clinical Science Course (BCSC) dataset. The primary outcome was multiple-choice accuracy; secondary outcomes included head-to-head ranking via a Bradley-Terry model, rationale quality assessment using a reference-anchored, pairwise LLM-as-a-judge framework, and analysis of accuracy-cost trade-offs using token-based cost estimates. GPT-5-high achieved the highest accuracy (0.965; 95% CI, 0.942-0.985), outperforming all GPT-5-nano variants (P < .001), o1-high (P = .04), and GPT-4o (P < .001), but not o3-high (0.958; 95% CI, 0.931-0.981). GPT-5-high ranked first in both accuracy (1.66x stronger than o3-high) and rationale quality (1.11x stronger than o3-high). Cost-accuracy analysis identified several GPT-5 configurations on the Pareto frontier, with GPT-5-mini-low offering the most favorable low-cost, high-performance balance. These results benchmark GPT-5 on a high-quality ophthalmology dataset, demonstrate the influence of reasoning effort on accuracy, and introduce an autograder framework for scalable evaluation of LLM-generated answers against reference standards in ophthalmology.
title Performance of GPT-5 Frontier Models in Ophthalmology Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09956