MedViz: An Agent-based, Visual-guided Research Assistant for Navigating Biomedical Literature

TL;DR

MedViz is a visual analytics system that combines AI agents and interactive visualization to enhance exploration, summarization, and hypothesis generation in large-scale biomedical literature, transforming traditional search into an exploratory process.

Contribution

MedViz introduces an integrated platform that combines semantic mapping, AI-driven querying, and visualization to improve biomedical literature exploration and hypothesis generation.

Findings

Enables iterative refinement of research questions.

Facilitates discovery of hidden connections in literature.

Accelerates knowledge discovery process.

Abstract

Biomedical researchers face increasing challenges in navigating millions of publications in diverse domains. Traditional search engines typically return articles as ranked text lists, offering little support for global exploration or in-depth analysis. Although recent advances in generative AI and large language models have shown promise in tasks such as summarization, extraction, and question answering, their dialog-based implementations are poorly integrated with literature search workflows. To address this gap, we introduce MedViz, a visual analytics system that integrates multiple AI agents with interactive visualization to support the exploration of the large-scale biomedical literature. MedViz combines a semantic map of millions of articles with agent-driven functions for querying, summarizing, and hypothesis generation, allowing researchers to iteratively refine questions, identify trends, and uncover hidden connections. By bridging intelligent agents with interactive visualization, MedViz transforms biomedical literature search into a dynamic, exploratory process that accelerates knowledge discovery.