Automatic Selection of Clinical Trials Based on A Semantic Web Approach.

Recruitment of patients in clinical trials is nowadays preoccupying, as the inclusion rate is particularly low. The main identified factors are the multiplicity of open clinical trials, the high number and complexity of eligibility criteria, and the additional workload that a systematic search of the clinical trials a patient could be enrolled in for a physician. The principal objective of the ASTEC project is to automate the prescreening phase during multidisciplinary meetings (MDM).

OWL model of clinical trial eligibility criteria compatible with partially-known information.

Background: Clinical trials are important for patients, for researchers and for companies. One of the major bottlenecks is patient recruitment. This task requires the matching of a large volume of information about the patient with numerous eligibility criteria, in a logically-complex combination.

OpenKnowledge for peer-to-peer experimentation in protein identification by MS/MS.

Background: Traditional scientific workflow platforms usually run individual experiments with little evaluation and analysis of performance as required by automated experimentation in which scientists are being allowed to access numerous applicable workflows rather than being committed to a single one. Experimental protocols and data under a peer-to-peer environment could potentially be shared freely without any single point of authority to dictate how experiments should be run. In such environment it is necessary to have mechanisms by which each individual scientist (peer) can assess, locally, how he or she wants to be involved with others in experiments.

Comparing semi-automatic systems for recruitment of patients to clinical trials.

Objectives: (i) To review contributions and limitations of decision support systems for automatic recruitment of patients to clinical trials (Clinical Trial Recruitment Support Systems, CTRSS). (ii) To characterize the important features of this domain, the main classes of approach that have been used, and their advantages and disadvantages. (iii) To assess the effectiveness and potential of such systems in improving trial recruitment rates.