Exceptional Performance of DeepSeek on Pediatric Board Examination Preparation Questions (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The integration of artificial intelligence in medical education raises questions about large language models' (LLMs) capabilities in specialized medical knowledge domains. Limited research exists evaluating AI performance on standardized pediatric assessments. OBJECTIVE To evaluate and compare the performance of three leading LLMs on pediatric board examination preparation questions and contextualize their performance against human physician benchmarks. METHODS We conducted a comparative analysis of DeepSeek 7B v2.5, ChatGPT-4, and ChatGPT-4.5 using 266 multiple-choice questions from the 2023 PREP® Self-Assessment (American Academy of Pediatrics). Each model was presented with identical questions covering the full spectrum of pediatric knowledge domains. Performance was measured by calculating the percentage of correct responses and compared to published first-time pass rates for the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) examination. RESULTS DeepSeek exhibited the highest accuracy at 98.12% (261/266 correct responses), exceeding typical human performance metrics. ChatGPT-4.5 achieved 96.6% accuracy (257/266), performing at the upper threshold of human performance. ChatGPT-4 demonstrated 82.7% accuracy (220/266), comparable to the lower range of human pass rates. Error pattern analysis revealed that AI models most commonly struggled with questions requiring integration of complex clinical presentations with rare disease knowledge. CONCLUSIONS Recent advancements in large language models have produced AI systems capable of performing at or above the level of board-certified pediatricians on standardized examination questions. These findings suggest potential applications in medical education, board examination preparation, and possibly clinical decision support. Further research should evaluate these AI systems on more complex clinical reasoning tasks and in simulated clinical scenarios.