Abstract
Abstract
Bone science literature spans biology, mechanics, materials science, and clinical medicine, and its volume makes reliable knowledge synthesis increasingly difficult. General-purpose large language models (LLMs) answer fluently but under-represent this niche domain, cannot cite specific evidence, and offer no mechanism to be corrected durably. Here we present BoneGraph, a domain-specialised system for bone science delivered as a five-tab web application over a shared substrate: a curated full-text corpus of 7,449 documents embedded into 248,629 passage vectors using SPECTER2, a scientific-paper embedding model, and a bone knowledge graph of 1,597 concepts with 1,699 causal relations. The five tabs are: (I) Chat, retrieval-augmented question answering with server-rebuilt inline citations; (II) Search, raw semantic retrieval with no LLM in the loop; (III) Reasoning, a self-correcting loop in which a deterministic physics check and a literature/knowledge-graph critic constrain the answer, and a user’s feedback becomes a durable, per-user rule; (IV) Vision, a bone-region classifier trained on frozen BiomedCLIP features that grounds a vision-language model, guarded against out-of-distribution inputs and augmented with image-embedding correction memory; and (V) Mechanics, integrating our previous data-driven image mechanics (D
2
IM) model that predicts displacement and strain fields from a single undeformed micro-CT image. All inference is performed locally, without third-party API calls, and the public beta is served at
bonegraph.org
. Retrieval attains a mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.928 on a 30-question, seven-domain benchmark, and the Vision classifier attains 92.6% accuracy on the held-out MURA (MUsculoskeletal RAdiographs) dataset. A grounded-reasoning benchmark shows that, with the correct passage, BoneGraph raises answer accuracy from 42% to 78%. BoneGraph makes a major contribution to bone-science informatics: to our knowledge it is the first domain-specialised system to unify curated retrieval, deterministic physics-grounded self-correction, and durable per-user learning for bone science.