Back

Kauro, a graph-based chatbot for high-fidelity information transmission conversations

King, C. H.; Barrick, R.; Almalvez, M.; Blanco, K.; De Dios, I.; Fusaro, V. A.; Delot, E.; Donohue, C. R.; Berger, S.; Xiao, C.; UCI GREGoR Site, ; Vilain, E.; LoTempio, J.

2026-02-02 health informatics
10.64898/2026.01.30.25342358 medRxiv
Show abstract

Across biomedical research and care, many conversations transmit information with profound practical, ethical, and legal consequences. The process of informed consent, where individuals decide to join a study or accept clinical care, is perhaps the most consequential, yet it is also complex, labor-intensive, and variable across sites. Existing platforms for information transmission in the informed consent context largely reproduce static documents and lack reproducibility or auditability, while generative chatbots offer flexibility at the cost of stochasticity, hallucination, and regulatory risk. We present Kauro, an open-source, graph-based chatbot that encodes scripted conversations as version-controlled JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structures, enabling deterministic traversal (ie, paths through the graph), complete audit logging, and IRB-verifiable oversight. Its modular separation of client, server, and script ensures portability across institutions. By operationalizing constraint rather than flexibility, Kauro reframes deployment of machine intelligence in biomedical communication with reproducibility and auditability, offering a scalable platform generalizable to any domain where conversations demand safety, precision, and trust.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.