Dental AI Research MCP

Remote MCP server giving Dental Research & Clinical Intelligence by Dr. Dana real research tools inside Claude Web and Claude Desktop.

Status: MVP, validated locally. NOT deployed. NOT yet wired into the Dental AI plugin. The public Dental AI v1.0.2 plugin is unmodified. DENTAL-AI-MASTER is untouched.

What a dentist can do with it

Exactly four tools. Nothing else is exposed in v1.

Deliberately out of scope: SFDA, Cochrane, Embase, Scopus, clinical guidelines, manufacturer IFUs, database, user accounts, dashboard, analytics, new clinical features.

Related MCP server: med-lit-mcp

Architecture

Claude Web / Claude Desktop
        │  MCP Streamable HTTP (JSON-RPC 2.0 over POST /mcp)
        ▼
   server.py            zero-dependency WSGI app — transport + tool registry
        │
        ▼
   tools.py             the 4 tool contracts, normalization, provenance, failure semantics
        │
        ▼
connector_bridge.py     isolated in-process loading of three connectors
        │
        ▼
   connectors/          VENDORED VERBATIM from Dental AI v1.0.2 — retrieval logic unchanged
   ├── pubmed/          ESearch + EFetch, retry, rate limiting, XML parsing
   ├── crossref/        DOI lookup, bibliographic search
   ├── clinical_trials/ ClinicalTrials.gov API v2
   └── shared/          EvidenceRecord, provenance, retry, identifiers
        │
        ▼
   PubMed · Crossref · ClinicalTrials.gov   (public APIs, no auth)

Why the retrieval logic was not rewritten

connectors/ is a byte-for-byte copy of the validated v1.0.2 connector packages. That code already carries the retry wiring, per-attempt rate limiting, retraction/correction parsing, and the failure-status taxonomy that took several releases to get right. Rewriting it would have thrown away that validation for no gain. This project adds a transport and a normalization layer on top — nothing more.

connector_bridge.py exists because each connector was written as a standalone CLI that imports a top-level errors / parser / models. Loading three of them into one process naively would let pubmed/errors.py and clinical_trials/errors.py fight over sys.modules["errors"], silently applying the wrong status taxonomy to the wrong connector. The bridge loads each under a private namespace so that cannot happen.

Zero dependencies

The server and all connectors are pure standard library. Python 3.9+ runs it with nothing installed. The single production dependency is gunicorn, the WSGI server that fronts it.

Safety properties

These are enforced in code and covered by tests.

Identifiers are never fabricated. A PMID, DOI or NCT ID appears in output only if an upstream payload actually carried it. A record that arrives without its identifier is dropped, never assigned one.

A retrieval failure is never "no evidence". UPSTREAM_ERROR, TIMEOUT, PARSE_ERROR and RATE_LIMITED return ok: false, results: null, and an explicit interpretation saying the result must not be read as an absence of evidence.

ZERO_RESULTS is distinct from failure. It means "this query matched nothing" — stated in the response as explicitly not establishing that no relevant evidence exists.

No overclaiming of coverage. search_systematic_reviews reports cochrane_status: NOT IMPLEMENTED (and the same for Embase and Scopus) on every response, and its description forbids presenting it as a Cochrane search.

Registry ≠ efficacy. Every clinical-trial response and every individual trial record carries the caveat that a registry record is not evidence an intervention works.

Provenance on everything. Every response and every record carries the source connector, source database, the exact query sent upstream, the retrieval status and a UTC timestamp.

Run locally

cd ~/Downloads/DENTAL-AI-RESEARCH-MCP
python3 server.py --port 8000

curl -s localhost:8000/health | python3 -m json.tool

curl -s -X POST localhost:8000/mcp -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | python3 -m json.tool

Tests

python3 tests/test_mcp.py

96 assertions: protocol conformance, all four schemas, live retrieval against all three upstreams, invalid-DOI handling, simulated upstream failure, identifier-fabrication guards, input validation, health, and a source scan for hard-coded credentials.

Endpoints

The health check hits einfo.fcgi (PubMed), /types (Crossref) and /version (ClinicalTrials.gov) — small metadata endpoints, so the probe cannot burn upstream rate limits.

Configuration

No configuration is required. All four functions use public APIs with no authentication.

Three optional environment variables improve upstream courtesy and limits. All are read from the environment by the vendored connectors and are never hard-coded:

There are no server secrets. There is no auth, no session store and no user data.

Deployment

See DEPLOY.md. One recommended host, with the exact steps.