Chiron

Chiron: Your clinical trials compass. Find clear, understandable summaries of current clinical trials relevant to your health condition so you can explore paths toward a brighter future.

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Inspiration

There is a lot of information asymmetry between patients and clinical trial data. In the past 2 decades, there have been nearly 500,000 major clinical trials conducted worldwide, but the information regarding these trials are generally inaccessible to the public and are difficult to understand by the average patient. Chiron aims to bridge these gaps by providing understandable summaries to users who want to learn more about their health condition and the ongoing trials related to their condition.

What it does

Chiron is a web application that provides clear summaries of clinical trials related to a user's health condition. To use this application, users will navigate to Chiron's home page, where they are greeted by a simple form to input their condition and summary preferences:

  • Purpose: Whether a user is seeking help on their condition or they are looking to research into the condition
  • Level of medical expertise: Whether the user is familiar with medical knowledge or they have no medical background
  • Depth of information: Whether the user wants a detailed or concise summary of the trials

After submitting these preferences, the top 10 clinical trial summaries along with a combined overall summary will be displayed on the application page, with information on the experiment conducted, the results from the trial, as well as the next steps of the trial.

How we built it

The application is built using ReactJS interface with Flask backend. The summaries are generated using Gemini, and the prompts are customized based on the preferences submitted by the user. We used the clinicaltrials.gov API to find the clinical trials data. We utilized Gemini's system instructions feature to pre-prompt the model based on the user's preferences (e.g. medical expertise, purpose of using application, etc.).

Challenges we ran into

  • Developing our application with Gemini's rate limit of 2 requests per minute
  • Creating specific prompts in Gemini that will generate consistent results

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was able to create a MVP of Chiron which accomplishes the main feature of providing understandable summaries of the top clinical trials related to the user's health condition.

What we learned

Our team has learned a lot from using Gemini 1.5 Pro! Specifically, we learned how to create robust prompts that will generate consistent results across different requests. This is extremely important for our application as we want to provide consistent and valid summaries of different clinical trials. Additionally, we learned how to customize prompts based on tone and purpose, so we could provide summaries based on a user's level of medical expertise and the depth of information they seek.

What's next for Chiron

Chiron has a bright future ahead with many areas to expand in. Here are some more features that can be integrated into Chiron:

  • Notification feature for users to get relevant, up-to-date information on the status of ongoing trials
  • Scoring system on relevancy and reputability of clinical trial sources
  • Integration with healthcare portals with information on alternative medications for users
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