SuSastho.AI: A multimodal medical copilot for adolescents using evidence-based medicine and large language models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adolescents in Bangladesh face serious sexual, reproductive, and mental health challenges due to cultural stigma, poverty, and limited healthcare infrastructure. Within the country, 63% of adolescents are deprived of essential sexual and reproductive health services, and only 13% receive mental health support. Adolescents living in urban slums and with disabilities face additional challenges in receiving reliable health information. This limited access exposes them to a high risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and serious mental health issues. Addressing these challenges, our study introduces SuSastho.AI, a healthcare copilot providing access to reliable health information to adolescents. We utilized large language models, along with Evidence-Based Medicine, retrieval-augmented generation, and a clinically validated dataset to provide evidence-based responses, supporting both voice and text-based interactions. Clinical evaluation of a pilot study shows our method reduces incorrect responses by 26.9% and increases response correctness by 16.1% compared to other methods. It achieved an accuracy rate of 86.7% when specifically evaluated based on available knowledge. While the responses are mostly consistent with up-to-date medical practices, occasional, less precise responses highlight the need for further refinement. Participants reported overall positive feedback, where 87% found answers to their questions, and 90.7% found responses relevant. Our results show that SuSastho.AI can provide reliable and evidence-based information while being an affordable way to support traditional healthcare systems with a high potential to transform digital health. The study sets an example as an evidence-based healthcare copilot to support adolescents and lays the foundation for future research where evidence-based tools overcome social barriers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it