Methodological Review: Formal representation of eligibility criteria: A literature review
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Building a library of eligibility criteria to support design of clinical trials
EKAW'12 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
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Medical research would benefit from automatic methods that support eligibility evaluation for patient enrollment in clinical trials and design of eligibility criteria. In this study we addressed the problem of formalizing eligibility criteria. By analyzing a large set of breast cancer clinical trials we derived a set of patterns, that capture typical structure of conditions, pertaining to syntax and semantics. We qualitatively analyzed their expressivity and evaluated coverage using regular expressions, running experiments on a few thousands of clinical trials also related to other diseases. Based on an early evaluation we conclude that derived patterns cover the language of eligibility criteria to a large extent and may serve as a semi-formal representation. We expect that extending the presented method for pattern recognition with recognition of ontology concepts will facilitate generating computable queries and automated reasoning for various applications.