CLARA-MeD Tool - A System to Help Patients Understand Clinical Trial Announcements and Consent Forms in Spanish

Abstract

We present an NLP web-based tool to help users understand consent forms (CFs) and clinical trial announcements (CTAs) in Spanish. For complex word identification, we collected: 1) a lexicon of technical terms and simplified synonyms (14 465 entries); and 2) a glossary (70 547 terms) with explanations from sources such as UMLS, the NCI dictionary, Orphadata or the FDA. For development, we extracted entities from 60 CTAs, 60 CFs and 60 patient information documents (PIDs). To prepare definitions for new terms, we used ChatGPT and experts validated them (28.99% needed to be fixed). We tested the system on 15 new CTAs, 15 CFs, and 15 PIDs, and we achieved an average F1 score of 82.91% (strict match) and of 94.65% (relaxed). The tool is available at: http://claramed.csic.es/demo.