AI Teacher — Neurosurgeon RAG Learning Platform

A web application for neurosurgeons to upload medical textbooks (PDF), have them embedded into a pgvector store, then select from a predefined topic list to receive AI-generated cross-book summaries, and engage in grounded RAG chat.

Architecture

graph TD
    User["Neurosurgeon (Browser)"]
    Login["Login Page\n(username + password form)"]
    FE["Frontend\nVue.js 3 / Vite\n:5173"]
    BE["Backend\nSpring Boot 4 / Spring AI\n:8080"]
    Auth["Spring Security\nHTTP Basic Auth"]
    DB["PostgreSQL + pgvector\n(source of truth)"]
    FS["File Store\nuploads/ (local disk)\nExtracted figure PNGs"]
    LLM["LLM Provider\n(OpenAI)\nEmbeddings + Chat + Vision"]

    User -->|"First visit / unauthenticated"| Login
    Login -->|"POST credentials\n(GET /api/v1/auth/check)"| Auth
    Auth -->|"401 → back to login\n200 → app access"| Login
    Login -->|"Authenticated"| FE
    FE -->|"REST /api/v1/...\n(HTTP Basic on every request)"| Auth
    Auth --> BE
    BE -->|"JDBC — books, chapters,\nsections, figures, refs"| DB
    BE -->|"pgvector — text chunks\n+ figure caption vectors"| DB
    BE -->|"PNG read/write\n(figure extraction)"| FS
    FE -->|"GET /api/v1/figures/**\n(static file serving)"| BE
    BE -->|"Embedding + Chat\n+ Vision (image description)"| LLM

    subgraph "Embedding Pipeline (per PDF upload)"
        EP1["Parse pages → SectionEntity"]
        EP2["Extract images → FigureEntity"]
        EP3["Vision describe → embed caption"]
        EP4["Chunk text → embed chunks"]
        EP5["Link chunks ↔ figures"]
        EP1 --> EP2
        EP1 --> EP4
        EP2 --> EP3
        EP4 --> EP5
        EP3 --> EP5
    end

    subgraph "Retrieval Pipeline (per chat query)"
        RP0["Query expansion\n(QueryExpansionService)\nlay → clinical terms"]
        RP1["Text chunk search (topK=5)"]
        RP2["Figure caption search (topK=3)"]
        RP3["Expand chunks → ±1-page section text"]
        RP4["Fetch linked figures (chunk_figure_ref)"]
        RP5["Merge + deduplicate figures"]
        RP6["Build labelled prompt\n[S1],[F1]… tags"]
        RP7["LLM chat call"]
        RP8["Citation validation\n(CitationValidatorService)\nstrip hallucinated refs"]
        RP0 --> RP1
        RP0 --> RP2
        RP1 --> RP3
        RP1 --> RP4
        RP2 --> RP5
        RP4 --> RP5
        RP3 --> RP6
        RP5 --> RP6
        RP6 --> RP7
        RP7 --> RP8
    end

Marker API Response Structure

The PDF parsing pipeline calls a local Marker server (POST /marker/upload).

Top-level envelope

{
  "format": "json",
  "output": "<JSON-encoded string>"
}

output is a JSON-encoded string (not a nested object) and must be parsed a second time to get the document tree.

Parsed output shape

{
  "children": [ <Page block>, ... ]
}

Block types

Every block shares these fields:

Field	Type	Notes
id	string	e.g. /page/0/Picture/2
block_type	string	see table below
html	string	rendered HTML; may contain <content-ref>
bbox	[x0,y0,x1,y1]	bounding box in page coordinates
children	array or null	nested blocks
images	object or null	base64 PNG map (leaf image blocks only)
section_hierarchy	object	heading ancestry

Known block_type values

block_type	Category	Notes
Page	structure	Top-level; direct children are the page content
SectionHeader	text	Section / chapter heading
Text	text
TextInlineMath	text
ListItem	text
Table	text
Code	text
Equation	text
Footnote	text
Caption	text	Usually a child of a *Group block
PageHeader	text
PageFooter	text
Handwriting	text
Picture	image	Leaf block; images map holds base64 PNG keyed by ID
Figure	image	Leaf block; same as Picture
PictureGroup	container	Wraps one Picture + one Caption child
FigureGroup	container	Wraps one Figure + one Caption child

Image extraction

Images are only present on leaf image blocks (Picture, Figure). Group blocks (PictureGroup, FigureGroup) have images: null — the base64 PNG lives on the child leaf block.

PictureGroup
├── Picture   ← images: { "/page/0/Picture/2": "<base64 PNG>" }
└── Caption   ← html: "<p>Figure 1 — ...</p>"

Stack

• Backend: Spring Boot 4.0.5 + Spring AI 2.0.0-M4, Java 25, Maven
• Frontend: Vue.js 3 + Vite + TypeScript + Pinia + Axios
• Database: PostgreSQL 16 + pgvector extension
• Auth: HTTP Basic (single shared in-memory user)

Quick Start

See specs/001-neuro-rag-learning/quickstart.md for full instructions.

Local Dev (JVM)

# Start the database
docker compose up -d

# Backend
cd backend
mvn spring-boot:run

# Frontend
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Native Image Build

Produces a GraalVM native binary packaged into a minimal Docker image via Jib.

Prerequisite: GraalVM 25 must be installed and set as JAVA_HOME.

# Install GraalVM 25 CE via sdkman (one-time)
sdk install java 25-graalce
sdk use java 25-graalce

# Build native executable + Docker image (requires Docker daemon)
cd backend
mvn -Pnative package jib:dockerBuild -DskipTests

The image ai-teacher-backend:latest will appear in your local Docker. It starts in under 1 second and uses significantly less memory than the JVM image.

Run Native Stack (Docker Compose)

# Copy and fill in secrets
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env — add OPENAI_API_KEY at minimum

# Start PostgreSQL + native backend
docker compose -f docker-compose.native.yml up

App available at http://localhost:8080.

Build Pipeline (Native)

graph LR
    SRC["Source Code\n(Java 25)"]
    AOT["Spring Boot AOT\n(process-aot)"]
    NI["GraalVM native-image\n(native-maven-plugin)"]
    EXE["Native Executable\ntarget/ai-teacher-backend"]
    JIB["Jib\n(jib-native-image-extension)"]
    IMG["Docker Image\nai-teacher-backend:latest\n(distroless base)"]

    SRC --> AOT
    AOT --> NI
    NI --> EXE
    EXE --> JIB
    JIB --> IMG

Environment Variables

Backend

Variable	Required	Description
OPENAI_API_KEY	Yes	OpenAI API key for embeddings and chat
APP_PASSWORD	Yes	Shared password for HTTP Basic auth
DB_URL	Yes	JDBC URL, e.g. jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/aiteacher
DB_USERNAME	Yes	Database username
DB_PASSWORD	Yes	Database password
FIGURE_STORAGE_PATH	No	Base path for uploaded PDFs and extracted figures (default: ./uploads)
UPLOAD_ENABLED	No	Set to false to disable the book upload endpoint (default: true)
DELETE_ENABLED	No	Set to false to disable the book delete endpoint (default: true)

Frontend

Variable	Required	Description
VITE_API_URL	No	Backend API base URL (default: /api/v1)
VITE_APP_PASSWORD	Yes	Shared password for HTTP Basic auth (must match APP_PASSWORD)
VITE_UPLOAD_ENABLED	No	Set to false to hide the upload UI (default: true)
VITE_DELETE_ENABLED	No	Set to false to hide the delete button (default: true)