Towards an Aspect-Based Ranking Model for Clinical Trial Search

摘要

Clinical Trials are crucial for the practice of evidence-based medicine. It provides updated and essential health-related information for the patients. Sometimes, Clinical trials are the first source of information about new drugs and treatments. Different stakeholders, such as trial volunteers, trial investigators, and meta-analyses researchers often need to search for trials. In this paper, we propose an automated method to retrieve relevant trials based on the overlap of UMLS concepts between the user query and clinical trials. However, different stakeholders may have different information needs, and accordingly, we rank the retrieved clinical trials based on the following four aspects - Relevancy, Adversity, Recency, and Popularity. We aim to develop a clinical trial search system which covers multiple disease classes, instead of only focusing on retrieval of oncology-based clinical trials. We follow a rigorous annotation scheme and create an annotated retrieval set for 25 queries, across five disease categories. Our proposed method performs better than the baseline model in almost 90% cases. We also measure the correlation between the different aspect-based ranking lists and observe a high negative Spearman rank's correlation coefficient between popularity and recency.