Semantically-enabled Intelligent Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials

This paper presents and analyzes the data requirements within the clinical trial design process with particular focus on the selection of patients who are eligible to participate in the specified clinical study. The latter comprises an extremely time-consuming process which requires considerable budget and effort, whereas the resulting recruited subjects determine both the success of the clinical study and the validity of the clinical study results significantly. Hence, a novel approach based on Service Oriented Architecture mechanisms and the incorporation of a great number of ontologies enabling the semantic linking between clinical research and clinical care and the interpretation of numerous distributed heterogeneous data sources is presented and analyzed followed by the expected impact of its application in the clinical study design and implementation processes.