Open challenges for the automatic synthesis of clinical trials

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Clinical Trial Analysis
• Data Visualization

Background:

• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses require comparable clinical trial outcomes.
• Standardizing diverse clinical outcomes is a significant challenge.
• A dataset of 211 glaucoma and type 2 diabetes mellitus trial abstracts was used.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a tool for visualizing and grouping clinical trial information by outcomes.
• To address the challenge of outcome standardization in clinical trial comparison.
• To facilitate the synthesis of clinical trials through outcome grouping.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an annotated dataset of 211 clinical trial abstracts.
• Developed a visualization tool to provide an overview of annotated trial data.
• Enabled users to group clinical trials based on measured outcomes.

Main Results:

• Successfully grouped outcomes and associated clinical trials using the visualization tool.
• Identified the most common outcomes in clinical trials for glaucoma and type 2 diabetes mellitus.
• Demonstrated alignment between grouped outcomes and stakeholder-consented outcomes in a diabetes case study.

Conclusions:

• The developed tool aids in standardizing clinical outcomes for improved synthesis of clinical trials.
• Outcome standardization is crucial for effective systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
• Recommendations are provided for automating clinical trials based on standardized outcomes.