John H. Gennari, David Sklar, and John Silva
Information & Computer Science Dept, University of California, Irvine CA <gennari@ics.uci.edu
iKnowMed, Inc., Berkeley CA <sklar@iknowmed.com>
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda MD <silvajo@mail.nih.gov>
Abstract
To be effective, informatics tools for clinical trial protocols must inter-operate
and share knowledge. We demonstrate a simple XML-based communication of eligibility
criteria information between two independently-developed informatics tools.
Using a shared DTD model of criteria, an authoring tool (developed within the
Protégé environment) can send a list of eligibility criteria to a commercial
system for automatic eligibility determination (the "iKnowChart" system by iKnowMed).
The criteria model, developed as a Protégé ontology, includes both the terminology
and the logic needed to compute eligibility for a given patient. As a demonstration
of cross-tool communication, we have encoded criteria from an active clinical
trial protocol (E1199), and shown how use of the authoring tool can effectively
update the eligibility knowledge and the behavior of the commercial iKnowChart
system. As part of the cross-tool knowledge sharing, we use Common Data Elements,
an oncology terminology developed by the National Cancer Institute.