Reuse of EUCAIM Ontology for Prescreening Use Case

Implementing patient-trial matching during Clinical Trials (CT) execution requires a time consuming and usually manual processing of eligibility criteria (EC) focusing on those that are both the most relevant at the pre-inclusion step and the most computable using Electronic Health Records data. The aim of this study is to design an ontology-based data dictionary for standardizing EC to support patient eligibility determination. We previously decomposed manually free text EC from 51 CT into data elements to be considered at the prescreening step to build the PENELOPE data dictionary. We aligned this dictionary to an existing common data model and ontology developed within the EUCAIM (Europe CAncer IMage) project. Results: A total of 100 data elements DE were captured in the alignment framework including 10 DE with direct match between PENELOPE and EUCAIM data models and 74 with partial match with syntactic or semantic gaps. Three DE were present only in PENELOPE and 13 only in EUCAIM. The structure of the PENELOPE data dictionary has been revised and its semantic content enriched with 292 concepts of the EUCAIM ontology that were relevant for prescreening. This study provides an ontology-based enrichment of the PENELOPE data dictionary used to represent prescreening-oriented EC from CT protocols ensuring the scalability of the PENELOPE prescreening use case beyond the 51 CT initially considered.