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. 2011 Dec;18 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):i116-24.
doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000321. Epub 2011 Jul 31.

EliXR: an approach to eligibility criteria extraction and representation

Chunhua Weng  1 , Xiaoying Wu, Zhihui Luo, Mary Regina Boland, Dimitri Theodoratos, Stephen B Johnson
Affiliations

EliXR: an approach to eligibility criteria extraction and representation

Chunhua Weng et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2011 Dec.

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. Eight-six 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 data-driven 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.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The hierarchical syntax of an example criterion. Semantic role labels are in bold text. The corresponding sentence constituents are in italic text.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The EliXR framework and its key steps. UMLS, unified medical language systems.
Figure 3
Figure 3
An example semantically labelled parse tree for myocardial infarction within 90 days of study start, unstable angina within 14 days of study start, or any clinical evidence of active myocardial ischemia.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The EliXR semantic network for eligibility criteria.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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