PASTEL: A Semantic Platform for Assisted Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment

Clinical trial recruitment encompasses many challenging tasks. Chief amongst those is the fast and reliable recruitment of eligible participants for the study. Much of this selection is still performed manually, despite the possibility of missing eligible patients (up to 60% according to some studies). To mitigate this issue, a Topic Maps-based semantic platform was developed at the Antwerp University Hospital to assist in the recruitment of clinical trial participants from the full patient population. The platform consists of (1) a Web-based editor for the creation of ontology-based clinical trial representations, (2) a patient evaluator that connects to structured and unstructured hospital data sources to determine eligibility for a clinical trial, and (3) a Web-based analytics module for reviewing evaluation results. The semantic nature of the clinical trial representation allows for generic formalization as well as for local adaptation of the study protocol to accommodate a specific hospital IT infrastructure.