Biomedical Literature Q&A System Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Abstract

This work presents a Biomedical Literature Question Answering (Q&A) system based on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, designed to improve access to accurate, evidence-based medical information. Addressing the shortcomings of conventional health search engines and the lag in public access to biomedical research, the system integrates diverse sources, including PubMed articles, curated Q&A datasets, and medical encyclopedias ,to retrieve relevant information and generate concise, context-aware responses. The retrieval pipeline uses MiniLM-based semantic embeddings and FAISS vector search, while answer generation is performed by a fine-tuned Mistral-7B-v0.3 language model optimized using QLoRA for efficient, low-resource training. The system supports both general medical queries and domain-specific tasks, with a focused evaluation on breast cancer literature demonstrating the value of domain-aligned retrieval. Empirical results, measured using BERTScore (F1), show substantial improvements in factual consistency and semantic relevance compared to baseline models. The findings underscore the potential of RAG-enhanced language models to bridge the gap between complex biomedical literature and accessible public health knowledge, paving the way for future work on multilingual adaptation, privacy-preserving inference, and personalized medical AI systems.