Ten board-certified endocrinologists looked at photographs of 138 people's hands and tried to say which ones had acromegaly. Their best F1 score, a combined measure of precision and recall, was 0.63. An AI model reading the same images scored 0.89.
The study, from a Kobe University team with graduate student Yuka Ohmachi as first author and endocrinologist Hidenori Fukuoka as senior author, runs in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, in the August 2026 print issue after publishing online in February. It drew on 716 participants and 11,480 images from 15 Japanese pituitary centers.
