Development and Feasibility Evaluation of an Edge AI as Medical Device System for Breast Cancer Multidisciplinary Team Meetings
Breast Cancer Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) meetings manage increasingly complex cases under considerable time pressure, and documentation requirements can reduce clinical efficiency and decision quality. Existing AI based MDT workflows rely on cloud-based processing, limiting their use because patient discussions contain identifiable information. We developed a fully on-device AI pipeline using open-source Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Large Language Models (LLMs) that transcribes breast cancer MDT discussions, structures clinical information, and generates treatment recommendations using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounded in National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance. The pipeline runs on a single NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, ensuring that patient audio, transcripts, and outputs remain within institutional infrastructure. Evaluation included two recorded simulated MDT discussions, ten clinically validated synthetic discussions, and 1,270 acoustically augmented recordings. Optimisation of Whisper large-v3 reduced word error rate by 20.7% and 24.4% on the recorded discussions and achieved performance within 0.58% WER and 1.58% word information lost of a commercial clinical ASR benchmark on augmented audio. MedGemma-RAG identified 2.3 times more MDT-concordant interventions than a proprietary cloud comparator (p = 0.020), with no significant difference in overall accuracy. Stakeholders identified automated documentation, treatment recommendation support, and case triage as the most credible near-term applications while highlighting workflow integration, governance, and clinician trust as key implementation challenges. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-preserving, fully on-device AI for MDT documentation and guideline-informed decision support, providing a foundation for prospective clinical evaluation.