CTrO-Editor: A Web-based Tool to Capture Clinical Trial Data for Aggregation and Pooling

Abstract

As the number of clinical trials carried out and published worldwide keeps growing, better tools for synthesizing the available knowledge become increasingly important. It still requires a significant effort and expertise to aggregate the evidence and results from different clinical trials, a task that is at the core of secondary or comparative studies, meta-analyses, and (living) systematic reviews. Our hypothesis is that the practical challenges involved in synthesizing evidence can be alleviated if the results of clinical trials would be published in a machine-readable format using a well-defined (semantic) vocabulary. Building on the C-TrO ontology that we developed in earlier work to support the aggregation of evidence from clinical trials as the main use case, in this paper we examine the question whether it is feasible for clinical researchers and medical practitioners to describe the results of clinical trials using the C-TrO ontology. For this purpose, we implemented a Web-based tool called CTrO-Editor that uses a form-based interaction paradigm to allow users to enter all the details regarding study population, arms, endpoints, observations and results of a clinical trial, and that exports the data in an RDF format. We describe the results of the evaluation of the CTrO-Editor with five medical students. Our preliminary results suggest that our paradigm for semantifying clinical trials is feasible, as the students could all successfully model a publication of their choice using our tool within a couple of hours.