MED-COPILOT: A Medical Assistant Powered by GraphRAG and Similar Patient Case Retrieval

Shuheng Chen, Namratha Patil, Haonan Pan, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Yao Du, Ruishan Liu, Jieyu Zhao


Abstract
Clinical decision-making requires synthesizing heterogeneous evidence, including patient histories, clinical guidelines, and trajectories of comparable cases. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, they remain prone to hallucinations and struggle to integrate long, structured medical documents. We present MED-COPILOT, an interactive research prototype for evidence-aware clinical reasoning, designed to help clinicians and medical trainees inspect guideline-level and patient-level evidence. MED-COPILOT combines guideline-grounded GraphRAG retrieval with hybrid semantic-keyword similar-patient retrieval to support transparent and evidence-aware clinical reasoning. The system builds a structured knowledge graph from WHO and NICE guidelines, applies community-level summarization for efficient retrieval, and maintains a 36,000-case similar-patient database derived from SOAP-normalized MIMIC-IV notes and Synthea-generated records.We evaluate our framework on clinical note completion and medical question answering, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms parametric LLM baselines and standard RAG, improving generation fidelity and benchmark QA accuracy. The full system is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/shuhengc/MED-COPILOT, enabling users to inspect retrieved evidence, visualize token-level similarity contributions, and conduct guided follow-up analysis. Our results suggest a practical and interpretable approach to integrating structured guideline knowledge with patient-level analogical evidence for clinical LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-demo.49
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Greg Durrett, Ping Jian
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
493–503
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-demo.49/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuheng Chen, Namratha Patil, Haonan Pan, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Yao Du, Ruishan Liu, and Jieyu Zhao. 2026. MED-COPILOT: A Medical Assistant Powered by GraphRAG and Similar Patient Case Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 493–503, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MED-COPILOT: A Medical Assistant Powered by GraphRAG and Similar Patient Case Retrieval (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-demo.49.pdf