Patient Selection for Clinical Trials Using Temporalized Ontology-Mediated Query Answering

Franz Baader, Stefan Borgwardt, Walter Forkel

Abstract: Finding suitable candidates for clinical trials is a labor-intensive task that requires expert medical knowledge. Our goal is to design (semi-)automated techniques that can support clinical researchers in this task. We investigate the issues involved in designing formal query languages for selecting patients that are eligible for a given clinical trial, leveraging existing ontology-based query answering techniques. In particular, we propose to use a temporal extension of existing approaches for accessing data through ontologies written in Description Logics. We sketch how such a query answering system could work and show that eligibility criteria and patient data can be adequately modeled in our formalism.