Using the Research Hub

Introduction

The Research Hub is Theator's AI-powered research workspace. It pairs you with a research assistant that brings four kinds of expertise to your study at once:

• a data scientist — builds your cohort, joins the data, and derives the measures your study needs
• a biostatistician — chooses the right test, runs it, and reports the result properly
• a clinician — interprets what the numbers mean and flags the subgroup worth a second look
• a medical writer — drafts in IMRAD structure, keeps the citations, and formats for submission

It works on your real data: the surgical intelligence in your Theator library — automatically captured video, structured surgical steps and events, and case metadata — alongside your own uploaded files and the published literature. Because intra-operative timings can be read from the annotated video rather than from the operative note, your measurements reflect what actually happened in the room.

What it removes: data, time, and finding the right people

Three things usually stand between a good clinical question and a finished paper, and the Research Hub is built to remove all three:

• Reaching the data. The answer is often already in your hospital, spread across the EHR, the operative note and hours of recorded surgery nobody has time to review. Theator gives you that surgery back as your own data, supercharged by AI: every recorded case is automatically annotated into structured surgical steps, events and intra-operative timings — measurements that exist in no EHR field and in no operative note, and that are unique to your hospital because they come from your operations. The research assistant uses that layer natively, inside the app, alongside the rest of your internal clinical data, the files you upload and the published literature — so what gets measured is no longer limited to what someone remembered to write down.
• The time each iteration costs. Traditionally, every turn of a study costs weeks: assemble the cohort by hand, chase the labs, wait on a statistician, then start over when a reviewer asks something new. Months → minutes — you ask in plain language, and the cohort, the joined data, the statistics and the draft come back while you are still thinking, so changing your mind costs a sentence instead of a month. When an iteration is cheap, the exploratory question and the subgroup check actually get run.
• Having all the right expertise at once. A serious study needs a data scientist, a biostatistician, a clinician and a medical writer. The assistant brings all four to the same conversation.

You stay the researcher. You set the clinical question, decide which patients count, and choose what belongs in the paper. The assistant supplies the reach, the rigor and the speed, and it guides you from exploration all the way to publication, one approved step at a time.

The Research Hub is available to administrators. If you don't see it, contact your Customer Success Manager to confirm your access.

Finding the Research Hub

Open the Research Hub from the left sidebar, under Clinical Research. The landing page offers three ways in — analyze your surgical data, ground your work in the literature, or write the manuscript — along with your recent projects.

New to the Hub? Select Take a tour for a guided walkthrough of about a minute. You can restart it at any time.

Two layouts, rolling out venue by venue. The screenshots in this article show the newer projects layout, where your work is grouped into projects that each contain conversations. If your left sidebar instead shows a flat list of individual sessions, your venue is still on the earlier layout — everything else in this article still applies, and your Customer Success Manager can tell you when projects are switched on for you.

Projects and conversations

This section describes the newer projects layout — see the note under Finding the Research Hub if your sidebar shows a flat list of sessions instead.

Your work is organized into projects, listed down the left side of the screen. Use the search box to find one, or the + button to start a new one.

A project is one study or research goal. Opening a project shows its front page: the research question it is built around, when it was created, who owns it, and the conversations inside it. Everything the assistant produces is filed underneath the project.

Each project holds as many conversations as you need — one for building the cohort, one for the literature, one for drafting the manuscript. All the conversations in a project share a single workspace, so starting a fresh line of thinking never costs you the study you have already built up. Your cohort, tables and analyses stay live in the project rather than going stale in a spreadsheet.

Select New conversation inside a project to add another, and use the ⋯ menu next to any project or conversation for options such as renaming or deleting it.

The workspace at a glance

Each conversation has two working areas:

• The AI research assistant (left) — a conversational assistant. Type any question into the Ask a question… box at the bottom.
• The Workspace Panel (right) — organized into three tabs: Research, Materials, and Publication. It holds everything you have approved into the study, it is shared by every conversation in the project, and the manuscript is written from it.

Everything you build is tied to the current project and saved automatically as you work.

How the workflow works

The Research Hub guides you through a study in five phases:

Question → Cohort → Data points → Analysis → Article

A few things to know about how you and the assistant collaborate:

• You approve every change. Whenever the assistant suggests content — a research question, a cohort, a table, an analysis — an approval card appears in the conversation describing what's in it and why. Apply saves it to your Workspace Panel; Discard keeps you working on it. Nothing is saved silently.
• One step at a time. The assistant pauses for your input between steps, and you can jump ahead or backtrack at any point.
• The Workspace Panel is the source of truth. Everything you approve lands in the Research, Materials, and Publication tabs, and the manuscript is drafted from there.

For a written overview inside the app, open the ⋯ (Research Hub actions) menu and choose Tutorial.

Working with the AI research assistant

Use the assistant the way you'd brief a research collaborator — discuss your goals and concerns as you would with a bright colleague. You can:

• Ask questions about your surgical data — for example, "What factors affect operation duration?"
• Ask it to build or refine a cohort based on inclusion and exclusion criteria you describe.
• Ask it to search the literature or summarize what it found.
• Ask it to draft your research question, methods section or abstract, then edit the result yourself.

Because the assistant reads the structured annotations on your recorded procedures, it can derive measurements directly from what happened in the operating room rather than from free text in the operative note.

The assistant works from the data in your Theator library and the context of your current project, so as you refine your question and cohort, its answers become more specific to your study.

The Research tab

The Research tab is the core of your study:

• Research Question — the clinical question the project is built around. Type your own, or ask in chat and the assistant will help you shape one. Everything that follows is anchored to this question.
• Study Cohort — the group of cases your study draws from, with the criteria that defined it and a count of how many cases have video, annotations and operative reports. Upload a list of case IDs, or ask the assistant to build a cohort from filters such as procedure, venue, and dates. Your final analysis group is narrowed from here once you know which cases have everything the study needs.
• Tables — working data tables the assistant builds, such as a baseline "Table 1" describing who is in the study, and a results table holding what you measured. Open either to see its columns, units and how it was built.
• Analyses — statistical results such as comparisons, correlations and regressions. Each analysis records the method, the test choice, the result and a clinical interpretation, so you can cite it directly in the article.

Because Theator captures cases continuously and automatically, your cohort is drawn from a comprehensive, representative sample rather than a manually recorded subset — which helps reduce selection bias in your study.

The Materials tab

The Materials tab holds the supporting material for the study, ready for the assistant to draw on when it drafts. What the finished paper actually cites follows the Sources you tick in the Publication tab — adding something here makes it available, it does not on its own put it in the article:

• References — literature the assistant finds (PubMed and others) plus any papers you save. Use + Add Reference to add your own.
• Files — spreadsheets and documents you upload, to share data or extra context for the research. Spreadsheets (CSV, XLSX, XLS) can be loaded as working tables the assistant analyzes. Documents (PDF, DOCX) are not loaded as tables — they are kept as reading material the assistant can draw on for context.
• Figures — plots and diagrams, such as a cohort flow diagram or a chart of your results. Ask the assistant to produce one.

The Publication tab

The Publication tab is where your study becomes a paper. It has two sub-tabs.

Preparation

Start with the Abstract Draft — the outline that sets out what the paper says, in structured IMRAD form (Title, Objective, Methods, Results, Conclusion, Keywords). Write it directly, or have the assistant draft it from the material you've built, and edit any section in place.

Below it, Sources controls what the article is written from. Everything in your workspace is listed here — the article outline, research question, study cohort, tables, analyses, references and files — and you tick what belongs in the paper. Write article using sources then asks the assistant to draft from the items you ticked and to leave out the ones you didn't.

Treat the selection as direction to the assistant rather than a hard filter: it is instructed to use only your chosen sources, so review the finished draft and its citations before you rely on it.

Article

The Article sub-tab holds the drafted paper itself, written from the sources you chose, with a live word count. Edit it directly in the editor, or ask the assistant to revise any part of it.

Sharing, exporting and feedback

The ⋯ (Research Hub actions) menu in the top-right of the header acts on the whole project:

• Share Project — invite colleagues so they can open your research question, cohort, materials and draft. Everyone you've shared with is listed in the dialog, and you can change someone's access or remove them later. Where projects are enabled (see the note under Finding the Research Hub), you choose between Viewer and Editor — as shown below; on the earlier layout you share an individual session and recipients get view access only.
• Export — take your work out. Under Chat, Copy as Markdown or Copy as Plaintext copies the whole conversation to your clipboard. Under Publication, Export Article as PDF (LaTeX) downloads a typeset PDF of your draft and Export Article as LaTeX (.tex) downloads the LaTeX source, for a journal submission or a co-author who works in LaTeX.
• Share Feedback — tell us what is and isn't working.
• Tutorial — open a written overview of how the Hub works.

Both article exports are built from your Article sub-tab together with the byline and the references you have collected, so there is nothing to paste in. Your most recent edits are saved before the file is generated. The two options stay greyed out until the article has content, and Export appears only while a conversation is open.

Files you have already generated — exported tables and mined data — are listed under Downloads in the same ⋯ menu.

Get help

Have a question about a study, or want hands-on support? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us at support@theator.io. Theator's clinical and support teams can help at every stage — from defining your question to preparing your manuscript for submission.