EC-RAFT: Automated Generation of Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria through Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission3818 Authors

Abstract: Eligibility criteria (EC) are critical components of clinical trial design, defining the parameters for participant inclusion and exclusion. However, designing EC remains a complex, expertise-intensive process. Traditional approaches to EC generation often rely on user-prompted predefined categories, which limit adaptability and may fail to produce comprehensive, contextually appropriate criteria. To address these challenges, we introduce EC-RAFT, a method that utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) to generate structured and cohesive EC directly from clinical trial titles and descriptions. EC-RAFT integrates contextual retrieval, synthesized intermediate reasoning, and fine-tuned language models to produce comprehensive EC sets. To enhance clinical alignment evaluation with referenced criteria, we also propose an LLM-guided evaluation pipeline. Our results demonstrate that our solution, which uses Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as a base model, achieves a BERTScore of 86.23 and an EC-matched LLM-as-a-Judge score of 1.66 out of 3, outperforming zero-shot Llama-3.1 and Gemini-1.5 by 0.41 and 0.11 points, respectively. EC-RAFT was trained in a low-cost setup and, therefore, can be used as a practical solution for EC generation while ensuring quality and relevance in clinical trial design.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: NLP Applications, Machine Learning for NLP, Resources and Evaluation

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3818