A formal representation for numerical data presented in published clinical trial reports.
Assessing the quality of and integrating clinical trial reports are necessary to practice evidence-based medicine. In particular, the numerical data is essential to understanding the strength and quality of the clinical trial study. In this paper, we present a formal representation for standardizing numerical data in published clinical trial reports, and our efforts towards developing computational tools to capture and visualize this representation. The approach includes two aspects: a process model used to precisely define experimental context behind the numerical value; and a spreadsheet, an intuitive and familiar tool used to organize numerical data. We demonstrated this representation using clinical trial reports on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We performed a preliminary evaluation to determine the usefulness of this formalism for identifying the characteristics, quality and significance of a clinical trial. Our initial results demonstrate that the representation is sufficiently expressive to capture reported numerical information in published papers.
Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles.
Maurine
M
Tong
William
W
Hsu
Ricky K
RK
Taira
D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods; D004282:Documentation / Q000379:methods*; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled