Utilizing ChatGPT to Enhance Clinical Trial Enrollment

Clinical trials are a critical component of evaluating the effectiveness of new medical interventions and driving advancements in medical research. Therefore, timely enrollment of patients is crucial to prevent delays or premature termination of trials. In this context, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have emerged as a valuable tool for identifying and enrolling eligible participants. In this study, we propose an automated approach that leverages ChatGPT, a large language model, to extract patient-related information from unstructured clinical notes and generate search queries for retrieving potentially eligible clinical trials. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on two benchmark retrieval collections, shows improved retrieval performance compared to existing approaches when several general-purposed and task-specific prompts are used. Notably, ChatGPT-generated queries also outperform human-generated queries in terms of retrieval performance. These findings highlight the potential use of ChatGPT to enhance clinical trial enrollment while ensuring the quality of medical service and minimizing direct risks to patients.

UNIMIB at TREC 2021 Clinical Trials Track

This contribution summarizes the participation of the UNIMIB team to the TREC 2021 Clinical Trials Track. We have investigated the effect of different query representations combined with several retrieval models on the retrieval performance. First, we have implemented a neural re-ranking approach to study the effectiveness of dense text representations. Additionally, we have investigated the effectiveness of a novel decision-theoretic model for relevance estimation. Finally, both of the above relevance models have been compared with standard retrieval approaches. In particular, we combined a keyword extraction method with a standard retrieval process based on the BM25 model and a decision-theoretic relevance model that exploits the characteristics of this particular search task. The obtained results show that the proposed keyword extraction method improves 84% of the queries over the TREC's median NDCG@10 measure when combined with either traditional or decision-theoretic relevance models. Moreover, regarding RPEC@10, the employed decision-theoretic model improves 85% of the queries over the reported TREC's median value.

LeiBi@COLIEE 2022: Aggregating Tuned Lexical Models with a Cluster-driven BERT-based Model for Case Law Retrieval

This paper summarizes our approaches submitted to the case law retrieval task in the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) 2022. Our methodology consists of four steps; in detail, given a legal case as a query, we reformulate it by extracting various meaningful sentences or n-grams. Then, we utilize the pre-processed query case to retrieve an initial set of possible relevant legal cases, which we further re-rank. Lastly, we aggregate the relevance scores obtained by the first stage and the re-ranking models to improve retrieval effectiveness. In each step of our methodology, we explore various well-known and novel methods. In particular, to reformulate the query cases aiming to make them shorter, we extract unigrams using three different statistical methods: KLI, PLM, IDF-r, as well as models that leverage embeddings (e.g., KeyBERT). Moreover, we investigate if automatic summarization using Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) can produce an effective query representation for this retrieval task. Furthermore, we propose a novel re-ranking cluster-driven approach, which leverages Sentence-BERT models that are pre-tuned on large amounts of data for embedding sentences from query and candidate documents. Finally, we employ a linear aggregation method to combine the relevance scores obtained by traditional IR models and neural-based models, aiming to incorporate the semantic understanding of neural models and the statistically measured topical relevance. We show that aggregating these relevance scores can improve the overall retrieval effectiveness.