Evaluating an NLP-based approach to modeling computable clinical trial eligibility criteria.

One area of active research and development within the clinical research informatics domain is the design and use of clinical trial participant recruitment tools. Such tools require the definition of clinical trial eligibility criteria in a computable format. This abstract describes a pilot study employing a natural language processing-based approach for abstracting generic query patterns that are representative of eligibility criteria as found in a corpus of clinical trial protocol documents.