New RESEARCH Project on developing a 'General advice system' for ZINI

Here we go

Our team of wizards has been working on this research project from a few months now. The purpose is to develop a system that can give a ‘General advice’ or ‘answer common medical queries’ for our users.

We launched ZINI.ai with a mission to help billions get access to genuine and expert medical advice at low cost and without unwanted delays.

One of the most important aspects of this process was ‘history taking skills’ i,e Patient interview skills, which we trained her on as a priority. When you meet a human doctor the 1st step of the process that you go through is 'history taking'. So we trained her on that and now she could evaluate anyone's symptoms and do a thorough question answering interview to figure out what is the cause of these symptoms and what to do next. She can now guide patients after the history taking process in the right direction very well. 

But soon enough after the launch we also realised that many a times users have specific queries that need some quick advice or expert guidance, and they don’t need a full thorough evaluation all the time. Sometimes they just need, as we call it 'more info on something' like drugs or medicines or they need a quick 'general advice' from an expert on some topic of interest. e.g someone may ask ‘ How to loose excessive weight?’ Or like ‘ I am pregnant and i do not wish to go ahead with this pregnancy, Should I go medicines or surgery ?’ or 'One doctor is suggesting me to go for a surgery but my family physician says, even medicines can cure this ailment, what should i do?'

And hence began our work on developing a system that can give users an expert and peer reviewed expert advice on what to do next or help them get access to the best information they can.

For this our experts worked on developing a ‘General advice system’.

Although not entirely complete this is the 1st version of that system. Many improvements are in pipeline. But here is the 1st version that uses a dataset of approximately ~250,000 Medical queries and their answers given by doctors and other experts to train a model that can find the best possible answer for your query. More addons are also used at some places to use a hybrid approach and some addons are in pipeline to refine the answers even more.

Similar research projects are being undertaken in other parts of the world as well. Most popular one’s being ‘BIO-BERT’ developed in South Korea and ‘Docproduct’ developed by a team of researchers in USA. 

This one is our totally ingenious, #MadeInIndia, innovation developed totally by our team here in Chandigarh. We call it ‘BIO-USE’ and the results are quite promising so far. 

In my previous post on linkedIn I showed how a comparison of this new system we made (BIO-USE) is doing at par and at times better then an existing system named ‘docproduct’ in many queries. Here is a link of the relative comparison of 'BIO-USE' and 'docproduct' in being able to answer some queries that users asked ZINI in their android application.

As you can see the overall score when it comes to relevance and quality of answers is higher in 'BIO-USE' as figured out by our doctors.

All thanks to the genius of @Mr. Yugal Sharma with our entire team. 

Anycase, not going more into the details of how it works, here I am sharing a link where you can also test our Model and see results in real time. We haven’t yet deployed this in production version but we will do so very soon after a few improvements and tweaks. 

Until then we want you to try it out and give your feedbacks on how good did you find the answers given by 'BIO-USE' and would you recommend this to anyone.

Please share with anyone who might find this interesting.

Here is the link: https://brain.zini.ai/advise/

Please share your feedbacks in comments or email us at [email protected]

Try asking any medical queries and see the responses. 

If some response is really stupid or irrelevant, please take a screenshot and share a feedback with us at [email protected] . This helps us make things better over time. This also helps us test our models more rigorously.

What do you think?

Give it at try by visiting this link https://brain.zini.ai/advise/

Note that this is not medical advice. This is a research project for general public to test and reply us with their feedback. Do not blindly follow this as medical advice just yet.