Call for Participation: TREC 2020 Precision Medicine Track

[Kirk Roberts]

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TREC 2020 Precision Medicine Track

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Most work on precision medicine focuses on developing new treatments based on an individual's genetic, environmental, and lifestyle profile. The result is a data-driven approach investigating the best treatment for an individual patient. This promising approach has led to significant advances, including an explosion of scientific research, as embodied by the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). This presents an information problem for clinicians, however, as the vast literature available for precision medicine can make it difficult to find the most appropriate treatment for the clinician's current patient. The ability to quickly locate relevant information for a current patient using information retrieval (IR) has the potential to be an important tool for helping clinicians find the most up-to-date evidence-based treatment for their patients.

The 2020 TREC Precision Medicine track continues the prior Precision Medicine tracks (2017, 2018, 2019), which are a specialization of the previous TREC Clinical Decision Support track. Specifically, the 2020 Precision Medicine track focuses on the case of ranking evidence for specific treatment decisions.

Unlike the prior TREC Precision Medicine tracks, this year will not contain clinical trials.

--- Task Description ---

* Topics/Queries: Synthetic patients with cancer and one or more genetic variants

* Data Collection: scientific abstracts

* Website: http://www.trec-cds.org/2018.html

* Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/d/forum/trec-cds

We will be using synthetic cases created by precision oncologists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Each case will describe the patient's disease (type of cancer), the relevant genetic variants (which genes), basic demographic information (age, sex), and the proposed treatment. The cases are semi-structured and require minimal natural language processing.

Participants of the track will be challenged with retrieving biomedical articles, in the form of article abstracts (largely from MEDLINE/PubMed), addressing relevant treatments for the given patient.

--- Important Dates ---

ASAP: TREC Registration: https://ir.nist.gov/trecsubmit.open/application.html

 (contact me for help getting a registration key)

May 2020: Document collection available for download

June 2020: Topics available for download

August 27, 2020: Results submission deadline

October 2018: Relevance judgements and individual evaluation scores released

Late October 2020: Initial system description papers due

November 18-20, 2020: TREC 2020 conference at NIST

--- Organizing Committee ---

Kirk Roberts (UTHealth)

William Hersh (OHSU)

Dina Demner-Fushman (NLM)

Ellen Voorhees (NIST)

Alexandar Lazar (UT MD Anderson Cancer Center)

Shubham Pant (UT MD Anderson Cancer Center)

Funda Meric-Bernstam (UT MD Anderson Cancer Center)  

--- Contact ---

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/d/forum/trec-cds