GregoryAI aims to improve the lives of researchers and patients alike

I enjoyed learning about GregoryAI, a tool that uses traditional machine learning techniques to examine new peer-reviewed papers and trustworthy sources and determine trends. It’s being used to gather and filter research into multiple sclerosis, but it’s a fully open source project that could be geared towards filtering research in any scientific field.

Feeds are processed and automatically classified. Don’t be fooled by the AI in the name: there are no chatbots or automatic summaries here. Instead, incoming articles are classified for relevance and tagged for easier retrieval. You can also see trends across articles, for example to see how the volume of published research into cell therapy for MS has changed over time. You can also receive email alerts, for example, digests of new clinical trials. And at its heart, the system provides browsable structured feeds tuned to help researchers and patients get to information faster.

This focus on practical research tools reflects the project's deeply personal origins. Like many open source projects, it scratches the author’s itch. Some open source projects aim to solve a simple problem with the author’s operating system or digital workflows. In contrast, Bruno Amaral was diagnosed with MS during lockdown.

Although I’m less familiar with MS, the desire to investigate a medical diagnosis deeply through the emerging scientific literature resonates deeply. There’s a genetic telomere dysfunction that runs in my family. We still have binders of printed research papers from when my mother was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. When you or a loved one have a major condition, understanding the current state of the science is an obvious need, and wanting to help the medical professionals involved in finding a cure becomes existentially important – and finding relevant resources, let alone staying on top of the literature, is really hard.

More than anything, what Bruno needs to help develop GregoryAI is input from scientific researchers and practicing clinicians. His aim is to build a tool that genuinely improves your working life. If that’s you, if you know someone who matches this description, or if you want to help him in any way, reach out to him at this link.