Medical Search Engine with SPLADE + Sentence Transformers in Python

From the creator

In this video, we'll build a search engine for the medical field using hybrid search with NLP information retrieval models. We use hybrid search with sentence transformers and SPLADE for medical quesiton-answering. By using hybrid search we're able to search using both dense and sparse vectors. This allows us to cover semantics with the dense vectors, and features like exact matching and keyword search with the sparse vectors. For the sparse vectors we use SPLADE. SPLADE is the first sparse embedding method to outperform BM25 across a variety of tasks. It's an incredibly powerful technique that enables the typical sparse search advantages while also enabling learning term expansion to help minimize the vocabulary mismatch problem. The demo we work through here uses SPLADE and a sentence transformer model trained on MS-MARCO. These are all implemented via Hugging Face transformers. Finally, for the search component we use the Pinecone vector database. The only vector DB at the time of writing that natively supports SPLADE vectors.  🔗 Code notebook: https://github.com/pinecone-io/examples/blob/master/learn/search/hybrid-search/medical-qa/pubmed-splade.ipynb 🎙️ AI Dev Studio: https://aurelio.ai/ 🎉 Subscribe for Article and Video Updates! https://jamescalam.medium.com/subscribe https://medium.com/@jamescalam/membership 👾 Discord: https://discord.gg/c5QtDB9RAP 00:00 Hybrid search for medical field 00:18 Hybrid search process 02:42 Prerequisites and Installs 03:26 Pubmed QA data preprocessing step 08:25 Creating dense vectors with sentence-transformers 10:30 Creating sparse vector embeddings with SPLADE 18:12 Preparing sparse-dense format for Pinecone 21:02 Creating the Pinecone sparse-dense index 24:25 Making hybrid search queries 29:59 Final thoughts on sparse-dense with SPLADE #artificialintelligence #nlp #naturallanguageprocessing #machinelearning #searchengine

Stop watching · start building
Matched to BERT

Makers residency 4th edition

Your idea can be anything. At our last workshops, people built plant-based nutrition businesses, a way to measure planetary resilience, crochet headwear and a way to connect lonely people living in the same building. An asset manager went on to raise an additional £25M on their fund within nine months. The fourth workshop is a full day at KOKO with Nick Sarafa, learning to build with Claude Code. Bring the thing you keep meaning to start. We’ll bring the pizza.

◆ Fri 13 Nov 2026 ◆ KOKO, London
Makers residency 4th edition
Live event
Makers residency 4th edition
Fri 13 Nov 2026
Find a job · 1 live role

Jobs in AI.
Apply now.

Apply once › get screened › meet the company

See all roles

More like this

Running one yourself?

List your AI event,
wherever it is.

A meetup, a workshop, a hackathon, a conference. Any city, or online. Tell us about it and it lands in front of people already learning this stuff.