What Happens When? Interpreting Schedule of Activity Tables in Clinical Trial Documents

Clinical trial protocols are complex documents that must be translated manually for trial execution and management. We have developed a system to automatically transform a schedule of activity (SOA) table from a PDF document into a machine interpretable form. Our system combines semantic, structural, and NLP approaches with a "human in the loop" for verification to determine which cells contain activity or temporal information, and then to understand details of what these cells represent. Using a training and test set of 20 protocols, we assess the accuracy of identifying specific types of SOA elements. This work is the first stage of a larger effort to use artificial intelligence techniques to extract procedural logic in clinical trial documents and to create a knowledge base of protocols for insights and comparison across studies.