NurRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Nursing Q&A

NurRAG is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed specifically for the nursing field. It combines Large Language Models (LLM) with professional nursing knowledge bases to address issues in nursing Q&A such as low efficiency of traditional retrieval, lack of professionalism in general LLMs, and their tendency to generate "hallucinations", thereby enhancing the accuracy, reliability, and traceability of answers.

Nursing staff need to handle a large number of professional issues daily, often facing situations of incomplete information and time constraints. Traditional information retrieval is inefficient; while general LLMs have extensive knowledge, they lack medical professionalism and timeliness, and tend to generate "hallucinations". NurRAG was developed to address these pain points. By combining LLMs with professional nursing knowledge bases, it balances language understanding and generation capabilities with the professionalism and traceability of answers.

NurRAG is optimized based on the typical RAG architecture:

1. Knowledge Base Construction: Integrate authoritative materials such as basic nursing theory, clinical guidelines, and drug manuals, process them into semantic units in a structured way, with a focus on standardization of medical terms and synonym mapping;
2. Retrieval Module: Adopt a hybrid strategy of dense vector retrieval (semantic similarity) + sparse keyword retrieval (exact matching), integrating results through learned fusion;
3. Generation Module: Based on LLMs, further pre-trained and fine-tuned with nursing domain corpora to enhance the ability to understand and use medical terms.

The technical innovations of NurRAG include:

1. Domain-specific retrieval strategy: Automatically identify key medical entities, expand queries based on knowledge graphs, and optimize document reordering;
2. Multi-hop reasoning support: Dynamically adjust retrieval strategies to build a complete evidence chain;
3. Answer interpretability: Provide cited sources to facilitate nursing staff in tracing the basis and conducting manual review.

Evaluations on multiple nursing Q&A datasets show that NurRAG significantly outperforms general LLMs in answer accuracy, professionalism, and safety, especially reducing the error rate of high-risk issues (such as drug dosages and contraindications). The accuracy of factual questions is nearly perfect, and it performs well on comprehensive reasoning questions.

Application Prospects: Can be integrated into electronic medical record systems, nursing education platforms, or the core engine of intelligent nursing assistants. Challenges: Need to continuously maintain the timeliness of the knowledge base (medical knowledge updates quickly); meet strict medical AI safety and compliance regulatory requirements.

NurRAG provides a reference for RAG applications in vertical domains: General RAG architectures can be effective in professional fields after targeted optimization. Key factors include the construction of high-quality domain knowledge bases, domain adaptation of retrieval strategies, and domain fine-tuning of generation models. This experience can be applied to other professional fields such as law and finance.