Numerical Eligibility Criteria in Clinical Protocols: Annotation, Automatic Detection and Interpretation

Abstract

Clinical trials are fundamental for evaluating therapies and diagnosis techniques. Yet, recruitment of patients remains a real challenge. Eligibility criteria are related to terms but also to patient laboratory results usually expressed with numerical values. Both types of information are important for patient selection. We propose to address the processing of numerical values. A set of sentences extracted from clinical trials are manually annotated by four annotators. Four categories are distinguished: C (concept), V (numerical value), U (unit), O (out position). According to the pairs of annotators, the inter-annotator agreement on the whole annotation sequence CV U goes up to 0.78 and 0.83. Then, an automatic method using CFRs is exploited for creating a supervised model for the recognition of these categories. The obtained F-measure is 0.60 for C, 0.82 for V , and 0.76 for U .

CAS: corpus of clinical cases in French

“…Finally, medical data, close to those handled in the clinical context, can be found in clinical trials protocols. One example is the corpus of clinical trials annotated with information on numerical values in English [ 36 ], and on negation in French and Brazilian Portuguese [ 37 , 38 ].…”

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis

“…Our patient aquired clinical and hematological remission without serious adverse events. values in English (Claveau et al, 2017), and on negation in French and Brazilian Portuguese (Dalloux et al, 2018).…”