Clustering Research Proposal Submissions to Understand the Unmet Needs of Military Clinicians

The Advanced Medical Technology Initiative (AMTI) program solicits research proposals for technology demonstrations and performance improvement projects in the domain of military medicine. Advanced Medical Technology Initiative is managed by the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC). Advanced Medical Technology Initiative proposals span a wide range of topics, for example, treatment of musculoskeletal injury, application of virtual health technology, and demonstration of medical robots. The variety and distribution of central topics in these proposals (problems to be solved and technological solutions proposed) are not well characterized. Characterizing this content over time could highlight over- and under-served problem domains, inspire new technological applications, and inform future research solicitation efforts.

This research sought to analyze and categorize historic AMTI proposals from 2010 to 2022 (n = 825). The analysis focused specifically on the "Problem to Be Solved" and "Technology to Demonstrated" sections of the proposals, whose categorizations are referred to as "Problem-Sets" and Solution-Sets" (PS and SS), respectively. A semi-supervised document clustering process was applied independently to the two sections. The process consisted of three stages: (1) Manual Document Annotation-a sample of proposals were manually labeled along each thematic axis; (2) Clustering-semi-supervised clustering, informed by the manually annotated sample, was applied to the proposals to produce document clusters; (3) Evaluation and Selection-quantitative and qualitative means were used to evaluate and select an optimal cluster solution. The results of the clustering were then summarized and presented descriptively.

The results of the clustering process identified 24 unique PS and 20 unique SS. The most prevalent PS were Musculoskeletal Injury (12%), Traumatic Injury (11%), and Healthcare Systems Optimization (11%). The most prevalent SS were Sensing and Imaging Technology (27%), Virtual Health (23%), and Physical and Virtual Simulation (11.5%). The most common problem-solution pair was Healthcare Systems Optimization-Virtual Health, followed by Musculoskeletal Injury-Sensing and Imaging Technology. The analysis revealed that problem-solution-set co-occurrences were well distributed throughout the domain space, demonstrating the variety of research conducted in this research domain.

A semi-supervised document clustering approach was applied to a repository of proposals to partially automate the process of document annotation. By applying this process, we successfully extracted thematic content from the proposals related to problems to be addressed and proposed technological solutions. This analysis provides a snapshot of the research supply in the domain of military medicine over the last 12 years. Future work should seek to replicate and improve the document clustering process used. Future efforts should also be made to compare these results to actual published work in the domain of military medicine, revealing differences in demand for research as determined by funding and publishing decision-makers and supply by researchers.