Microsoft says its medical AI system can diagnose difficult cases more than twice as accurately as practicing doctors.

Dubbed the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), the system “substantially outperformed practicing generalist physicians” in diagnostic accuracy while ordering fewer tests and procedures, according to a newly published paper.

The Microsoft study, titled “Sequential Diagnosis with Language Models,” was first posted online last year on arXiv as a non-peer-reviewed preprint. On Thursday, the findings were finally published in the peer-reviewed journal Science .

That’s a major step toward validating the findings, but any real-world deployment would still require clinical testing, Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told The Verge . Microsoft already has plans for that: the company’s AI health lead, Dr.…