FACTS (Find the Appropriate Clinical Trials) for You: A Computer-Based Decision Support System for Breast Cancer Patients
Abstract
The Find Appropriate Clinical Trials (FACTS) system was redesigned to make it more accurate and compliant with existing standards. An explicit data model of patient eligibility for breast cancer clinical trials was developed, and served as the basis for encoding eligibility criteria. Standard vocabularies were utilized to represent concepts used in the system, and to retrieve their hierarchical relationships. The system now uses Bayesian networks to handle missing patient information. Protocols are presented to the user ranked by the likelihood that the patient is eligible for each one of them. As a result of a detailed data model, most of the eligibility criteria in 10 clinical trial protocols taken from the National Cancer Institute database were encoded and the performance of the system was compared to that of two oncologists. In a preliminary evaluation, there was a good agreement between the system's selection of clinical trials and those of two oncologists (kappa 0.86, 0.76). All cases in which the system's selection of a protocol did not agree with any of the physicians were analyzed, and the system's limitations were identified. The disagreement on ranking the protocols (kappa 0.24, 0.14) is discussed.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 2001
- Accession Number
- ADA392468
Entities
People
- Lucila Ohno-machado
Organizations
- Brigham and Women's Hospital