CARMINA: The AI model for cardiovascular research developed by the CNIC

Researchers from the Computational Systems Biomedicine group at the Spanish National Cardiovascular Research Centre (CNIC) are developing CARMINA, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant designed to support cardiovascular research.

It is a system based on language models and information retrieval that provides specialised answers to biomedical questions, ensuring data privacy by operating exclusively within the CNIC. This ensures that users’ conversations and data will not be used for commercial purposes or exploited externally, unlike commercial models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini.

To evaluate CARMINA’s performance, RAGQA, a complementary internal initiative that measures the accuracy, completeness and clarity of AI-generated responses, has been launched. Specifically, this project compares CARMINA’s answers with those provided by professionals, including cardiologists and researchers, with the aim of improving its capabilities and optimising its application in biomedical research.

‘CARMINA and RAGQA are part of the CNIC’s commitment to the integration of artificial intelligence in biomedical research, ensuring that these technologies are developed and evaluated with the utmost scientific rigour,’ says Fátima Sánchez Cabo, Principal Investigator of the CNIC’s Computational Systems Biomedicine group.