The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Increasing the efficiency of trial-patient matching: automated clinical trial eligibility Pre-screening for pediatric oncology patients
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Manual eligibility screening (ES) for a clinical trial typically requires a labor-intensive review of patient records that utilizes many resources. Leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction (IE) technologies, we sought to improve the efficiency of physician decision-making in clinical trial enrollment. In order to markedly reduce the pool of potential candidates for staff screening, we developed an automated ES algorithm to identify patients who meet core eligibility characteristics of an oncology clinical trial. METHODS: We collected narrative eligibility criteria from ClinicalTrials.gov for 55 clinical trials actively enrolling oncology patients in our institution between 12/01/2009 and 10/31/2011. In parallel, our ES algorithm extracted clinical and demographic information from the Electronic Health Record (EHR) data fields to represent profiles of all 215 oncology patients admitted to cancer treatment during the same period. The automated ES algorithm then matched the trial criteria with the patient profiles to identify potential trial-patient matches. Matching performance was validated on a reference set of 169 historical trial-patient enrollment decisions, and workload, precision, recall, negative predictive value (NPV) and specificity were calculated. RESULTS: Without automation, an oncologist would need to review 163 patients per trial on average to replicate the historical patient enrollment for each trial. This workload is reduced by 85% to 24 patients when using automated ES (precision/recall/NPV/specificity: 12.6%/100.0%/100.0%/89.9%). Without automation, an oncologist would need to review 42 trials per patient on average to replicate the patient-trial matches that occur in the retrospective data set. With automated ES this workload is reduced by 90% to four trials (precision/recall/NPV/specificity: 35.7%/100.0%/100.0%/95.5%). CONCLUSION: By leveraging NLP and IE technologies, automated ES could dramatically increase the trial screening efficiency of oncologists and enable participation of small practices, which are often left out from trial enrollment. The algorithm has the potential to significantly reduce the effort to execute clinical research at a point in time when new initiatives of the cancer care community intend to greatly expand both the access to trials and the number of available trials.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Figures



Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based tools have been used for subject matching across various diseases while struggling with generalizability [4–7].”
From Enhancing hepatopathy clinical trial efficiency: a secure, large language model-powered pre-screening pipeline (2025) · cites this paper as [4]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“While traditional manual screening and automated approaches have attempted to address these challenges, they fall short in key areas [4].”
From Enhancing hepatopathy clinical trial efficiency: a secure, large language model-powered pre-screening pipeline (2025) · cites this paper as [4]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Savova, G. K., Masanz, J. J., Ogren, P. V., Zheng, J., Sohn, S., Kipper-Schuler, K. C., & Chute, C. G. (2010) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/jamia.2009.001560 · Cited by 1,967
A Simple Algorithm for Identifying Negated Findings and Diseases in Discharge Summaries
Chapman, W. W., Bridewell, W. B., Hanbury, P., Cooper, G. F., & Buchanan, B. G. (2001) · Journal of Biomedical Informatics · doi:10.1006/jbin.2001.1029 · Cited by 1,121
Key factors in the rising cost of new drug discovery and development
Dickson, M., & Gagnon, J. P. (2004) · Nature Reviews Drug Discovery · doi:10.1038/nrd1382 · Cited by 507
Unlocking Clinical Data from Narrative Reports: A Study of Natural Language Processing
Hripcsak, G. M., Friedman, C., Alderson, P. O., DuMouchel, W., Johnson, S. B., & Clayton, P. D. (1995) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-122-9-199505010-00007 · Cited by 340
Chapman, W. W., Nadkarni, P. M., Hirschman, L., D'Avolio, L. W., Savova, G. K., & Uzuner, O. (2011) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000465 · Cited by 296
Formal representation of eligibility criteria: A literature review
Weng, C., Tu, S. W., Sim, I., & Richesson, R. (2009) · Journal of Biomedical Informatics · doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2009.12.004 · Cited by 187
Effect of a Clinical Trial Alert System on Physician Participation in Trial Recruitment
Embí, P. J., Jain, A., Clark, J. R., Bizjack, S., Hornung, R., & Harris, C. M. (2005) · Archives of Internal Medicine · doi:10.1001/archinte.165.19.2272 · Cited by 183
Clinical research informatics: challenges, opportunities and definition for an emerging domain
Embi, P. J., & Payne, P. R. O. (2009) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1197/jamia.m3005 · Cited by 163
Case Report: Electronic Screening Improves Efficiency in Clinical Trial Recruitment
Thadani, S. R., Weng, C.-H., Bigger, J., Ennever, J., & Wajngurt, D. (2009) · J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc. · doi:10.1197/jamia.m3119 · Cited by 128
Ni, Y., Kennebeck, S., Dexheimer, J. W., McAneney, C. M., Tang, H., Lingren, T., Li, Q., Zhai, H., & Solti, I. (2014) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2014-002887 · Cited by 115
Self-citationEffort Required in Eligibility Screening for Clinical Trials
Penberthy, L. T., Dahman, B. A., Petkov, V. I., & DeShazo, J. P. (2012) · Journal of Oncology Practice · doi:10.1200/jop.2012.000646 · Cited by 96
Embí, P. J., Jain, A., Clark, J. A., & Harris, C. M. (2005) · Europe PMC (PubMed Central) · Cited by 90
Automated matching software for clinical trials eligibility: Measuring efficiency and flexibility
Penberthy, L., Brown, R., Puma, F., & Dahman, B. A. (2010) · Contemporary Clinical Trials · doi:10.1016/j.cct.2010.03.005 · Cited by 84
Embí, P. J., Jain, A. K., & Harris, C. M. (2008) · BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making · doi:10.1186/1472-6947-8-13 · Cited by 66
Deléger, L., Brodzinski, H., Zhai, H., Li, Q., Lingren, T., Kirkendall, E. S., Alessandrini, E. A., & Solti, I. (2013) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2013-001962 · Cited by 53
Self-citationEnrolling patients into clinical trials faster using RealTime Recuiting.
Butte, A. J., Weinstein, D. A., & Kohane, I. S. (2000) · PubMed Central · Cited by 51
Self-citationEdinger, T., Cohen, A. M., Bedrick, S. D., Ambert, K. H., & Hersh, W. (2012) · PubMed Central · Cited by 50
A Knowledge-Based Approach to Medical Records Retrieval.
Demner‐Fushman, D., Abhyankar, S., Yepes, A. J., Loane, R. F., Rance, B., Lang, F.-M., Ide, N. C., Apostolova, E., & Aronson, A. R. (2011) · Cited by 48
Pressler, T. R., Yen, P., Ding, J., Liu, J. H., Embí, P. J., & Payne, P. (2012) · BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making · doi:10.1186/1472-6947-12-47 · Cited by 39
The accuracy and efficiency of electronic screening for recruitment into a clinical trial on COPD
Schmickl, C. N., Li, M., Li, G., Wetzstein, M. M., Herasevich, V., Gajic, O., & Benzo, R. P. (2011) · Respiratory Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.rmed.2011.04.012 · Cited by 37
Mining FDA drug labels for medical conditions
Li, Q., Deléger, L., Lingren, T., Zhai, H., Kaiser, M., Stoutenborough, L., Jegga, A. G., Cohen, K. B., & Solti, I. (2013) · BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making · doi:10.1186/1472-6947-13-53 · Cited by 34
Self-citationResearch subject enrollment by primary care pediatricians using an electronic health record.
Grundmeier, R. W., Swietlik, M., & Bell, L. M. (2007) · PubMed · Cited by 33
Heinemann, S., Thüring, S., Wedeken, S., Schäfer, T., Scheidt‐Nave, C., Ketterer, M., & Himmel, W. (2011) · BMC Medical Research Methodology · doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-16 · Cited by 30
Treweek, S. P., Pearson, E. R., Smith, N. K., Neville, R. G., Sargeant, P., Boswell, B., & Sullivan, F. (2010) · Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics · doi:10.14236/jhi.v18i1.753 · Cited by 28
Cengage Learning at TREC 2011 Medical Track
King, B., Wang, L., Provalov, I., & Zhou, J. (2011) · Text REtrieval Conference · Cited by 28
Sahoo, S. S., Tao, S., Parchman, A. J., Luo, J., Cui, L., Mergler, P., Lanese, R., Barnholtz‐Sloan, J. S., Meropol, N. J., & Zhang, G. (2014) · Cancer Informatics · doi:10.4137/cin.s19454 · Cited by 24
Limsopatham, N., McCreadie, R., Albakour, M., Macdonald, C., Santos, R. L. T., & Ounis, I. (2012) · Text REtrieval Conference · Cited by 21
Li, Q., Zhai, H., Deléger, L., Lingren, T., Kaiser, M., Stoutenborough, L., & Solti, I. (2012) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001487 · Cited by 21
Self-citationUniversity of Glasgow at Medical Records Track: Experiments with Terrier.
Limsopatham, N., Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., McDonald, G., & Bouamrane, M.-M. (2011) · Text REtrieval Conference · Cited by 20
A semantic platform for information retrieval from e-health records
Gurulingappa, H., Müller, B., Hofmann‐Apitius, M., & Fluck, J. (2011) · Publikationsdatenbank der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) · Cited by 18
Exploring Evidence Aggregation Methods and External Expansion Sources for Medical Record Search.
Zhu, D., & Carterette, B. (2012) · Text REtrieval Conference · Cited by 15
Nkoy, F. L., Wolfe, D., Hales, J. W., Lattin, G., Rackham, M., & Maloney, C. G. (2009) · PubMed Central · Cited by 11
The design of a pre-encounter clinical trial screening tool: ASAP.
Ding, J., Erdal, S., Borlawsky, T. B., Liu, J., Golden‐Kreutz, D. M., Kamal, J., & Payne, P. (2008) · PubMed · Cited by 6
Supporting Patient Screening to Identify Suitable Clinical Trials
Bucur, A., Jasper, V. L., Chen, N.-Z., Claerhout, B., Kristof, D. S., Pérez-Rey, D., Alonso-Calvo, R., Pugliano, L., & Saini, K. S. (2014) · Studies in health technology and informatics · doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-432-9-823 · Cited by 6
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Qi Y, Laquerre PF. Retrieving medical records with "sennamed": NEC labs America at TREC 2012 medical records track. In: The twenty first Text REtrieval Conference Proceedings (TREC). 2012. http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec21/papers/sennamed.medical.final.pdf (accessed 3 July 2014).
- Crane K. Overcoming age limits in cancer clinical trials. NCI Cancer Bull. 2010;7(10):8–9.
- Zhai H, Iyer S, Ni Y, Lingren T, Kirkendall E, Li Q, et al. Mining a large-scale EHR with machine learning methods to predict all-cause 30-day unplanned readmissions. In: Proc. of the 2nd ASE International Conference on Big Data Science and Computing. 2014. http://galaxy.cs.lamar.edu/~kmakki/2014-ASE/2014%20ASE%20Conference%20Stanford%20University%20Proceedings/Regular%20Full%20Paper/submission6.pdf (accessed 10 April 2015).
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Natural Language Processing of Clinical Notes on Chronic Diseases: Systematic Review
Sheikhalishahi, S., Miotto, R., Dudley, J. T., Lavelli, A., Rinaldi, F., & Osmani, V. (2019) · JMIR Medical Informatics · doi:10.2196/12239 · Cited by 558
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Early Cancer Diagnosis
Hunter, B., Hindocha, S., & Lee, R. W. (2022) · Cancers · doi:10.3390/cancers14061524 · Cited by 384
Evaluating eligibility criteria of oncology trials using real-world data and AI
Liu, R., Rizzo, S., Whipple, S., Pal, N., Pineda, A. L., Lu, M. W., Arnieri, B., Lü, Y., Capra, W. B., Copping, R., et al. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03430-5 · Cited by 333
Clinical Data Reuse or Secondary Use: Current Status and Potential Future Progress
Meystre, S. M., Lovis, C., Bürkle, T., Tognola, G., Budrionis, A., & Lehmann, C. U. (2017) · Yearbook of Medical Informatics · doi:10.15265/iy-2017-007 · Cited by 204
Automated Machine Learning for Healthcare and Clinical Notes Analysis
Mustafa, A., & Azghadi, M. R. (2021) · Computers · doi:10.3390/computers10020024 · Cited by 131
Metadata
- Authors
- Ni, Y., Wright, J., Perentesis, J., Lingren, T., Deleger, L., Kaiser, M., Kohane, I., & Solti, I.
- Affiliations
- Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ni, Yizhao
- Venue
- BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
- Published
- 2015-04-14
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 28-28
- ISSN
- 1472-6947 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4407835
- OpenAlex
- W2116972869
- Cited by
- 142
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 12.20
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
- National Institutes of Health (UL1TR001425, UL1TR000077, 1r21hd072883-01)
- National Human Genome Research Institute (U01HG006828)
- U.S. National Library of Medicine (R00LM010227)
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R21 HD072883, 1R21HD072883-01)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
- Keywords
- clinical trial eligibility screening, pediatric oncology, natural language processing, information extraction, electronic health records, clinical trial recruitment, physician workload reduction
- MeSH terms
- Child, Clinical Trials as Topic, Eligibility Determination, Humans, Natural Language Processing, Neoplasms, Information Storage and Retrieval, Patient Selection
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review