DeepSeek Empowers General Medicine: Potential Application and Prospect
摘要
In January 2025, DeepSeek launched its reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, characterized by open-source accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and strong reasoning capabilities, thus showing significant potential for applications within the medical domain. This paper examines the prospects for DeepSeek's implementation in general practice, demonstrating its potential to support clinical decision-making at primary care levels, facilitate comprehensive health education and management throughout the healthcare lifecycle, and bridge service gaps in remote, impoverished, and underserved regions. Additionally, DeepSeek-R1 enables to enhance research efficiency and promote innovative modes of medical education and training. However, its deployment also faces challenges concerning data governance, ethical standards, and technical specifications. Future exploration is recommended to facilitate the deep integration of large language models such as DeepSeek into multiple dimensions of general practitioners' activities-including clinical practice, scientific research, and medical education-thus maximizing the empowering role of artificial intelligence in general practice, developing an intelligent primary care ecosystem, and promoting high-quality development in general medicine.