Call for Participation: TREC 2023 Clinical Trials Track

[Kirk Roberts]

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TREC 2023 Clinical Trials Track
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Most clinical trials fail to meet their patient recruitment goal. NIH has estimated that 80% of clinical trials fail to meet their patient recruitment timeline and, more critically, many (or most) fail to recruit the minimum number of patients to power the study as originally anticipated. Efficient patient trial recruitment is thus one of the major barriers to medical research, both delaying trials and forcing others to terminate entirely.

Historically, clinical trial recruitment was driven by the trial coordinators (e.g., direct contact with clinical specialists or searching the electronic health record for eligible patients), but recently it has become increasingly common for patients to directly search for trials for enrollment (oftentimes in consultation with their clinician). The 2023 TREC Clinical Trials track simulates this scenario. Instead of using synthetic patient cases as in the 2021 and 2022 tracks, the 2023 track uses a simulated "questionnaire" that the patient or their clinician would fill out in order to identify eligible clinical trials. The track will use several high-level disorder questionnaire templates (e.g., glaucoma, COPD, anxiety), with each template having 5-12 fields customized to that disorder (e.g., the type 2 diabetes template has fields for HbA1c, glucose, BMI, insulin, etc.). For each template, there will be several topics representating synthetic patients with that condition but different values for the fields.

Participants of the track will be challenged with retrieving clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov, a required registry for clinical trials in the United States. Clinical trial descriptions can be quite long, but the core aspect of the trial description are the inclusion/exclusion criteria. These are not all-inclusive statements about the trial to the point that other trial information can be ignored, but they are key aspects to defining trial eligibility. The evaluation will further be broken down into eligible, excludes, and not relevant to allow retrieval methods to distinguish between patients that do not have sufficient information to qualify for the trial (not relevant) and those that are explicitly excluded (excludes).

If you are interested in participating, please visit the track website, subscribe to the track mailing list, and register for TREC (due this month).  Links to these items below.

--- Task Description ---
* Topics/Queries: Synthetic patient questionnaires
* Data Collection: ClinicalTrials.gov
* Website: http://www.trec-cds.org/2023.html
* Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/d/forum/trec-cds

--- Important Dates (Tentative) ---
ASAP: TREC Registration: https://ir.nist.gov/trecsubmit.open/application.html
Already: Document collection available for download (updated this year)
Already: Draft topics templates available for download

late May: Topics available
August 2023: Results submission deadline
October 2023: Relevance judgements and individual evaluation scores released
Late October 2023: Initial system description papers due
November 14-18, 2023: TREC 2023 conference (at NIST and/or virtual)

--- Organizing Committee ---
Kirk Roberts (UTHealth)
William Hersh (OHSU)
Dina Demner-Fushman (NLM)