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The client asked for a chatbot. We built a fancy PDF viewer instead

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Screenshot of The client asked for a chatbot. We built a fancy PDF viewer instead

A Belgian paediatric oncology challenge asked a team to make lengthy clinical trial protocols easier for doctors to use. Rather than put a chatbot in front of the PDFs, the team designed a structured viewer: clinicians still need to verify treatment decisions against the original protocol, and a chatbot would add cost while potentially requiring patient details. The viewer instead surfaces diagnostic checklists, risk groups, treatment pathways, start-of-treatment thresholds and monitoring schedules, with each item linked directly to its source page. Search handles clinical synonyms, abbreviations, typos and French and Dutch; an optional assistant provides brief, page-cited answers but is not the main interface.

The central technical challenge was extracting reliable information from inconsistent PDFs. A pipeline analyzes page layout and uses Gemini to label sections and treatment logic, while code copies clinical wording directly from the documents and checks quotations and numbers. Translated summaries undergo checks for changed values or meaning. Automated tests, visual comparison, hand-labelled examples and clinician questions drove iterative fixes; the demo scored 97% on the supplied questions. Processing costs roughly €5-€10 per protocol and is repeated when protocols change, while ordinary searches and viewer features require no model calls. Patient information stays out of the system: browsing does not send data to a model, and case progress is stored in the doctor’s browser. The team’s goal is a reusable pipeline whose checks improve across protocols.

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