Overview
Medipal is a medical report analyser our team built at the COMSYS hackathon, where it placed runner-up. You upload a PDF lab report, and Medipal reads it, explains possible findings and their likely causes in plain language, and lets you ask follow-up questions in a chat.
How it works
- Upload. A React (Vite) frontend with Clerk for authentication accepts the PDF report.
- Parse. An Express backend extracts the report text with
pdf-parse. - Analyse. The text goes to a GPT-3.5 model fine-tuned on the MedMCQA medical question dataset. It is prompted to answer in a fixed format: possible indications, likely causes, and a recommendation to seek further examination.
- Ask follow-ups. The chat keeps the report as context for follow-up questions. History stays in the browser's local storage.
Engineering decisions
- Fine-tuned, not just prompted. Training on MedMCQA gives the model medical vocabulary and a consistent, clinical tone.
- A fixed response shape as a guardrail. Every analysis ends by recommending further examination. It's a small constraint, but it matters for anything health-related.