MINI REVIEW article
Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Medicine and Public Health
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1689178
In the search for the perfect prompt in medical AI queries
Provisionally accepted
- 1Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania
- 2Spitalul Clinic CF 2, Bucharest, Romania
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The evaluation of medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems presents significant challenges, with performance often varying drastically across studies. This narrative review identifies prompt quality—the way questions are formulated for the AI—as a critical yet under-recognized variable influencing these outcomes. The analysis explores scientific literature published between January 2018 and August 2025 to investigate the impact of prompt engineering on the perceived accuracy and reliability of conversational AI in medicine. Results reveal a "performance paradox," where AI sometimes surpasses human experts in controlled settings yet underperforms in broader meta-analyses. This inconsistency is strongly linked to the type of prompt used. Critical concerns are highlighted, such as "prompting bias," which may invalidate study conclusions, and AI "hallucinations" that generate dangerously incorrect information. Furthermore, a significant gap exists between the optimal prompts formulated by experts and the natural queries of the general public, raising issues of safety and health equity. In the end we were interested in finding out what the optimal balance existed between the complexity of a prompt and the value of the generated response, and, in this context, whether we could attempt to define a path toward identifying the best possible prompt.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Prompt Engineering, Medical AI, generated responses, performance evaluation, AI ethics, General public, medical information
Received: 20 Aug 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Berghea, Berghea, Daia, Ciuc and Dinca. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Cristina Octaviana Daia, cristina.daia@umfcd.ro
Diana Ciuc, dr.ciucdiana@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.