ExaCT: automatic extraction of clinical trial characteristics from journal publications.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Clinical trials are one of the most important sources of evidence for guiding evidence-based practice and the design of new trials. However, most of this information is available only in free text - e.g., in journal publications - which is labour intensive to process for systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other evidence synthesis studies. This paper presents an automatic information extraction system, called ExaCT, that assists users with locating and extracting key trial characteristics (e.g., eligibility criteria, sample size, drug dosage, primary outcomes) from full-text journal articles reporting on randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Methods

ExaCT consists of two parts: an information extraction (IE) engine that searches the article for text fragments th

SUBMITTER: Kiritchenko S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2954855 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature