Work

A Formal Representation for Numerical Data Presented in Published Clinical Trial Reports

Year: 2013

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: Assessing the quality of and integrating clinical trial reports are necessary to practice evidence-based medicine. In particular, the numerical data is essential to understanding the strength and quality of the clinical trial study. In this paper, we present a formal representation for standardizing numerical data in published clinical trial reports, and our efforts towards developing computational tools to capture and visualize this representation. The approach includes two aspects: a process model used to precisely define experimental context behind the numerical value; and a spreadsheet, an intuitive and familiar tool used to organize numerical data. We demonstrated this representation using clinical trial reports on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We performed a preliminary evaluation to determine the usefulness of this formalism for identifying the characteristics, quality and significance of a clinical trial. Our initial results demonstrate that the representation is sufficiently expressive to capture reported numerical information in published papers.

Source: Studies in health technology and informatics

DOI: 10.3233/978-1-61499-289-9-856

Authors: Tong Maurine, Hsu William, Taira Ricky K

Language: English

Topic: Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies

Subfield: Molecular Biology

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine

Award: Data Structuring and Visualization System for Neuro-oncology