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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Data mining from ClinicalTrials.gov

Xiaohong Cao, et al., Data mining of cancer vaccine trials: a bird's-eye view, Immunome Research, December 12, 2008. Abstract:

Background: A wealth of information on clinical trials has been provided by publicly accessible online registries. Information technology and data exchange standards enable rapid extraction, summarization, and visualization of information and derived knowledge from these data sets. Clinical trials data was extracted in the XML format from the National Library of Medicine ClinicalTrials.gov site. This data includes categories such as 'Summary of Purpose', 'Trial Sponsor', 'Phase of the Trial', 'Recruiting Status', and 'Location'. We focused on 645 clinical trials related to cancer vaccines. Additional facts on cancer types, including incidence and survival rates, were retrieved from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance data. ...

Conclusion: We have developed a data mining approach that enables rapid extraction of complex data from the major clinical trial repository. Summarization and visualization of these data represents a cost-effective means of making informed decisions about the future cancer vaccine clinical trials.

See also our past posts on ClinicalTrials.gov.