Many technology companies are working on artificial intelligence systems that can analyze medical data to help diagnose or treat health problems. Such systems raise the question of whether this kind of technology can perform as well as a human doctor.

A new study from MIT computer scientists suggests that human doctors provide a dimension that, as yet, artificial intelligence does not. By analyzing doctors’ written notes on ICU patients, the researchers found that the doctors’ “gut feelings” about a particular patient’s condition played a significant role in determining how many tests they ordered for the patient.

“There’s something about a doctor’s experience, and their years of training and practice, that allows them to know in a more comprehensive sense, beyond just the list of symptoms, whether you’re doing well or you’re not,” says Mohammad Ghassemi, a research affiliate at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). “They’re tapping into something that the machine may not be seeing.”

This intuition plays an even stronger role during the first day or two of a patient’s hospital stay, when the amount of data doctors have on patients is less than on subsequent days.

Ghassemi and computer science graduate student, Tuka Alhanai, are the lead authors of the paper, which will be presented at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference on July 20. Other MIT authors of the paper are Jesse Raffa, an IMES research scientist, and Roger Mark, a professor of health sciences and technology and of electrical engineering and computer science. Shamim Nemati and Falgun Chokshi of Emory University are also authors of the study.