Patient-oriented clinical trials search through semantic integration of Linked Open Data

Patients facing a serious disease often want to be able to search for relevant clinical trials for new or more effective alternative treatments. The NIH makes all of its trials available on a website, in fact, for this purpose. Its search facility, however, is difficult to use and requires the patient to sift through lengthy text descriptions for relevant information. Our overall aim is to build a system that allows for a more patient-focused clinical trial search facility. In this paper, we present a semantic integration approach using RDF triples to develop an integrated clinical trial knowledge representation, by linking different Linked Open Data such as clinical trials provided by NIH as well as the drug side effects dataset SIDER. The integration model uses UMLS to link concepts from different sources with consistent semantics and ontological knowledge. Patient-oriented functions that our prototype system provides include semantic search and query with reasoning ability, and semantic-link browsing where an exploration of one concept leads to other concepts easily via links which can provide visual search for the end users.