Design of an Educational Chatbot Using Artificial Intelligence in Radiotherapy

Context: In cancer centres and hospitals particularly during the pandemic, there was a great demand for information, which could hardly be handled by the limited manpower available. This necessitated the development of an educational chatbot to disseminate topics in radiotherapy customized for various user groups, such as patients and their families, the general public and radiation staff. Objective: In response to the clinical demands, the objective of this work is to explore how to design a chatbot for educational purposes in radiotherapy using artificial intelligence. Methods: The chatbot is designed using the dialogue tree and layered structure, incorporated with artificial intelligence features such as natural language processing (NLP). This chatbot can be created in most platforms such as the IBM Watson Assistant and deposited in a website or various social media. Results: Based on the question-and-answer approach, the chatbot can provide humanlike communication to users requesting information on radiotherapy. At times, the user, often worried, may not be able to pinpoint the question exactly. Thus, the chatbot will be user friendly and reassuring, offering a list of questions for the user to select. The NLP system helps the chatbot to predict the intent of the user so as to provide the most accurate and precise response to him or her. It is found that the preferred educational features in a chatbot are functional features such as mathematical operations, which should be updated and modified routinely to provide new contents and features. Conclusions: It is concluded that an educational chatbot can be created using artificial intelligence to provide information transfer to users with different backgrounds in radiotherapy. In addition, testing and evaluating the performance of the chatbot is important, in response to user’s feedback to further upgrade and fine-tune the chatbot.