EliXR: An approach to eligibility criteria extraction and representation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2011

Abstract

Objective: To develop a semantic representation for clinical research eligibility criteria to automate semistructured information extraction from eligibility criteria text. Materials and Methods: An analysis pipeline called eligibility criteria extraction and representation (EliXR) was developed that integrates syntactic parsing and tree pattern mining to discover common semantic patterns in 1000 eligibility criteria randomly selected from http://ClinicalTrials.gov. The semantic patterns were aggregated and enriched with unified medical language systems semantic knowledge to form a semantic representation for clinical research eligibility criteria. Results: The authors arrived at 175 semantic patterns, which form 12 semantic role labels connected by their frequent semantic relations in a semantic network. Evaluation: Three raters independently annotated all the sentence segments (N=396) for 79 test eligibility criteria using the 12 top-level semantic role labels. Eightsix per cent (339) of the sentence segments were unanimously labelled correctly and 13.8% (55) were correctly labelled by two raters. The Fleiss' κ was 0.88, indicating a nearly perfect interrater agreement. Conclusion: This study present a semi-automated datadriven approach to developing a semantic network that aligns well with the top-level information structure in clinical research eligibility criteria text and demonstrates the feasibility of using the resulting semantic role labels to generate semistructured eligibility criteria with nearly perfect interrater reliability.

Identifier

84863557848 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000321

e-ISSN

1527974X

ISSN

10675027

PubMed ID

21807647

First Page

116

Last Page

124

Issue

SUPPL. 1

Volume

18

Grant

UL1RR024156

Fund Ref

National Center for Research Resources

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS