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Abstract Overly restrictive eligibility criteria for clinical trials may limit the generalizability of the trial results to their target real-world patient populations. We developed a novel machine learning approach using large collections of real-world data (RWD) to better inform clinical trial eligibility criteria design. We extracted patients’ clinical events from electronic health records (EHRs), which include demographics, diagnoses, and drugs, and assumed certain compositions of these clinical events within an individual’s EHRs can determine the subphenotypes—homogeneous clusters of patients, where patients within each subgroup share similar clinical characteristics. We introduced an outcome-guided probabilistic model to identify those subphenotypes, such that the patients within the same subgroup not only share similar clinical characteristics but also at similar risk levels of encountering severe adverse events (SAEs). We evaluated our algorithm on two previously conducted clinical trials with EHRs from the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Consortium. Our model can clearly identify the patient subgroups who are more likely to suffer or not suffer from SAEs as subphenotypes in a transparent and interpretable way. Our approach identified a set of clinical topics and derived novel patient representations based on them. Each clinical topic represents a certain clinical event composition pattern learned from the patient EHRs. Tested on both trials, patient subgroup (#SAE=0) and patient subgroup (#SAE>0) can be well-separated by k-means clustering using the inferred topics. The inferred topics characterized as likely to align with the patient subgroup (#SAE>0) revealed meaningful combinations of clinical features and can provide data-driven recommendations for refining the exclusion criteria of clinical trials. The proposed supervised topic modeling approach can infer the clinical topics from the subphenotypes with or without SAEs. The potential rules for describing the patient subgroups with SAEs can be further derived to inform the design of clinical trial eligibility criteria.
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LLM for Patient-Trial Matching: Privacy-Aware Data Augmentation Towards Better Performance and Generalizability
The process of matching patients with suitable clinical trials is essential for advancing medical research and providing optimal care. However, current approaches face challenges such as data standardization, ethical considerations, and a lack of interoperability between Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and clinical trial criteria. In this paper, we explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges by leveraging their advanced natural language generation capabilities to improve compatibility between EHRs and clinical trial descriptions. We propose an innovative privacy-aware data augmentation approach for LLM-based patient-trial matching (LLM-PTM), which balances the benefits of LLMs while ensuring the security and confidentiality of sensitive patient data. Our experiments demonstrate a 7.32% average improvement in performance using the proposed LLM-PTM method, and the generalizability to new data is improved by 12.12%. Additionally, we present case studies to further illustrate the effectiveness of our approach and provide a deeper understanding of its underlying principles.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2124789
- PAR ID:
- 10448809
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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