Information Extraction and Sentence Classification applied to Clinical Trial MEDLINE Abstracts

In this paper, firstly we report experimental results on applying information extraction (IE) methodology to the task of summarizing clinical trial design information in focus on ‘Compared Treatment’, ‘Endpoint’ and ‘Patient Population’ from clinical trial MEDLINE abstracts. From these results, we have come to see this problem as one that can be decomposed into a sentence classification subtask and an IE subtask. By classifying sentences from clinical trial abstracts and only performing IE on sentences that are most likely to contain relevant information, we hypothesize that the accuracy of information extracted from the abstracts can be increased. As preparation for testing this theory in the next stage, we conducted an experiment applying state-of-the-art sentence classification techniques to the clinical trial abstracts and evaluated its potential in the original task of the summarization of clinical trial design information.