ASTEC: Automatic selection of clinical trials based on eligibility criteria

Automatic Selection of clinical Trial based on Eligibility Criteria (ASTEC) project is to automate, so as to make it systematic, the search of cancer clinical trials, by reusing the patient data contained into an oncologic electronic health record. ASTEC project tackles two major scientific challenges for medical informatics: 1) the syntactic and semantic interoperability between information systems. The oncologic electronic medical records and the recruitment decision system must be interoperable. The ASTEC project proposes a framework of syntactico-semantic interoperability based on international standards. Generic methods of mediation and reasoning based on ontologies are developed to match data from the electronic medical records to the inclusion/exclusion criteria of clinical trials; 2) a decision support system for recruitment. We have developed inference methods on the electronic medical records adapted to the data structure as well as the eligibility criteria, this paper, we present and justify our choices, concerning the medical process in oncology and the scientific and technical aspects. Furthermore the system will be evaluated in real time. The aim is to demonstrate a significative improvement of the prescreening rate of patient. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.