MiKid-QA: construction and performance evaluation of a paediatric myopia education question-answering model.

Authors

Zixun Wang, Jingtao Yu, Tingyu Zhang, Daqian Lu, Yifan Li, Yabin Hu, Jun Zhou, Liqin Huang, Xiaoling Zhang, Xiaoxue Hu, Xueshuo Xie, Xu Yan, Jing Yang, Bei Du, Ruihua Wei

Published in

The British journal of ophthalmology. Oct 06, 2026. Epub Oct 06, 2026.

Abstract

The surging prevalence of paediatric myopia has overwhelmed clinical education services. While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for medical information, they often lack the domain-specific precision required for specialised care. This study aimed to develop and evaluate Myopia in Kids Question-Answering (MiKid-QA), a paediatric myopia education question-answering model fine-tuned to support standardised patient education.
We conducted a cross-sectional evaluation study. MiKid-QA was developed by fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-32B model using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) on curated professional datasets (2015-2025), including textbooks and expert consensus. Performance was assessed against DeepSeek and GPT-4 through a multicentre, single-blind expert evaluation of 25 standardised clinical scenarios. A panel of specialists rated responses across five dimensions (correctness, completeness, readability, helpfulness and safety) using a 5-point Likert scale.
MiKid-QA demonstrated superior automated performance compared with its base model (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy: 0.1423 vs 0.0967). In expert evaluations, MiKid-QA achieved significantly higher scores for correctness (4.43±0.63) and safety (4.38±0.59) compared with DeepSeek and GPT-4 (all p<0.001). While completeness and helpfulness were comparable (p>0.05), MiKid-QA produced more concise responses and lower reading difficulty than GPT-4 (p<0.001), suggesting a potentially favourable balance between information accuracy and patient accessibility in standardised educational scenarios.
Specialised fine-tuning on curated myopia-related datasets was associated with higher expert-rated correctness and safety in standardised myopia education scenarios. MiKid-QA may serve as an auxiliary educational tool to support patient communication in myopia care, although further external validation and prospective clinical studies are required before clinical deployment.

PMID:
42838726
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 07 Oct 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.