Adobe Acrobat and its generative AI features for Medical Writing

Here’s my first Medical Writing Magical Tip (MWMT#1) — Using Adobe Acrobat’s generative AI features. Let me briefly discuss how this can make your Medical Writing more efficient and easier (hanging comparator, I know, but you know what I mean).

I’m using the profession version of Adobe Acrobat — Acrobat Pro — and there are two interesting features that I’d like to talk about: 1) Generative summary and 2) AI assistant.

Adobe Acrobat and its generative AI features.

Now let’s fire up any one of the 17 journal article PDF files you have floating on your desktop (or download one from the 22 browser tabs that you find nearly impossible to close) and let’s test these out.

Generative summary

As the name implies, it creates a summary of your article by highlighting the key points in the publication and listing them out into digestible chunks of information.

As soon as you click on this button, Acrobat will process and summarize your document.

Needless to say, this is really useful for a busy-bee Medical Writer like ourselves. So when you haven’t onboarded the 4 review articles on a certain disease and the treatment landscape, why don’t you give ‘Generative summary’ a whirl for a concise summary of those articles. In my example below, it created multiple expandable tiles under the main headings (abstract, introduction, methods etc.) with a list of summary bullets.

How to use Generative summary

1. Open your PDF and just click on the ‘Generate summary’ button.

(You can find this function on the top right corner under the ‘AI Assistant’ button or you can click on ‘All tools’ menu on the top left, and scroll to the very bottom of the list.)

In the following screenshots, I’ve used a random open access article — Ahmad S et al. Mediterranean diet adherence and risk of all-cause mortality in women. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(5):e2414322.

When it’s done processing, you should see a breakdown of the article into the appropriate IMRaD headings on the right panel.

AI assistant

This new feature is going to really change how a Medical Writer learns, interprets and extracts information from multi-page journal articles to 120-page long documents (I believe 120 pages is the limit).

Like ChatGPT, you basically ask the AI assistant any question about (for example) the publication and it will generate an answer. My top favourite feature of this feature is that it also highlights or ‘marks up’ the source of that information.

Did anyone else have a flash of Veeva Promomats cross their minds for a second there?

This mark-up feature is a bonus because we all know that generative AI is prone to making ‘unbelievably believable’ stuff up (aka hallucinations). So being able to verify the AI response against the source content is just utterly super.

I asked AI assistant a simple question about this paper and it generated a response. Clicking on the boxed superscript numbers will take you to the source of the generated answer. This allows us Medical Writers to verify the accuracy of the information.

Interestingly, you can also get slightly different answers when you enter the same query again, or even on another day. But the answer is nevertheless ‘correct’. So I suppose Adobe’s AI Assistant has a bit of AI-ality and gives you a different answer depending on its AI-mood.

Unfortunately, I did notice a minor glitch that it sometimes generates the answer but it doesn’t mark up the source of that information within the document. But when I close and re-open the document, the mark ups appear again. If that doesn’t work, you can try the good-ol’ IT support go-to troubleshooting of resetting your laptop.

How to use AI assistant

1. Open your PDF and click the AI Assistant button in the top right corner. Let the system process the document for a little bit.
2. Fire away with your questions.

After Acrobat processes your document, it presents you with some sample questions about the publication you can ask. Or you can ask your own questions.

What’s next?

Be sure to check out my next post on reviewing Acrobat’s AI assistant in more depth and detail — a ‘product feature review’ if you will. I aim to explore Acrobat AI Assistant’s possibilities and limitations.

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Abbreviations: AI, artificial intelligence; IMRaD, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion; IT, information technology; PDF, portable document format.

Disclaimer: Like all generative AI tools, you’ll find the following disclaimer listed on the bottom right corner: “AI-generated summaries may be inaccurate or misleading. Be sure to double check summaries and sources.” Here’s my disclaimer, make sure you double check the accuracy of the generated content!