Prescreening in Oncology Using Data Sciences: The PreScIOUS Study

The development of precision medicine in oncology to define profiles of patients who could benefit from specific and relevant anti-cancer therapies is essential. An increasing number of specific eligibility criteria are necessary to be eligible to targeted therapies. This study aimed to develop an automated algorithm based on natural language processing to detect patients and tumor characteristics to reduce the time-consuming prescreening for trial inclusions. Hence, 640 anonymized multidisciplinary team meeting (MTM) reports concerning lung cancer were extracted from one teaching hospital data warehouse in France and annotated. To automate the extraction of 52 bioclinical information corresponding to 8 major eligibility criteria, regular expressions were implemented and evaluated. The performance parameters were satisfying: macroaverage F1-score 93%; rates reached 98% for precision and 92% for recall. In MTM, fill rates variabilities among patients and tumors information remained important (from 31.4% to 100%). The least reported characteristics and the most difficult to automatically collect were genetic mutations and rearrangement test results.