Using probabilistic methods to optimize data entry in accrual of patients
to clinical trials
Bhavesh D. Goswami, Lawrence O. Hall, Dmitry B. Goldgof, Eugene Fink, and
Jeffrey P. Krischer
In Proceedings of the Seventeenth IEEE Symposium on
Computer-Based Medical Systems, pages 434-439, 2004.
Abstract
A clinical trial is a study conducted on a group of patients to evaluate
a new treatment procedure. Usually, clinicians manually select patients
for a clinical trial; the choice of eligible patients is a labor-intensive
process, and clinicians are often unable to identify sufficient number
of patients, which delays the evaluation of new treatments. We have developed
a web-based system that helps clinicians to determine the eligibility of
patients for multiple clinical trials. It uses probabilistic techniques
that minimize the amount of manual data entry, by ordering the related
data-entry steps. We describe the developed system and give the results
of applying it to retrospective data of breast cancer patients at the Moffitt
Cancer Center.