PONTE: A context-aware approach for automated clinical trial protocol design

The rapidly increasing volume of published clinical and non-clinical data at a variety of sources and the resulting great effort required for researchers to access them and mine information of interest lead to clinical trials that are based on only a limited set of knowledge in the domain they cover. This restricted view of the clinical trials' context is quite often the reason behind unsuccessful trials and/or successful ones which, however, underestimate drugs' unwanted effects and thus their results are of low external validity in the much more complicated environment of clinical healthcare. In this paper, we present a context-aware approach, which has been developed in the PONTE project, for effectively guiding medical researchers during clinical trial protocol design and allowing for more efficient and effective access to scientific literature. The suggested approach incorporates intelligent services and advanced text mining mechanisms for scientific literature querying and mining during protocol design, taking into account the study context (i.e. active substance, target and disease) and the domain context in literature.