Trialstreamer: Mapping and Browsing Medical Evidence in Real-Time

TL;DR

Trialstreamer is a real-time, comprehensive database that extracts and synthesizes key information from clinical trial abstracts to aid clinicians in evidence appraisal and decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces an automated system for extracting trial details and outcomes from biomedical abstracts, enabling large-scale evidence mapping across clinical trials.

Findings

Automated extraction of trial participants, interventions, and outcomes.

Inference of intervention efficacy based on trial results.

Generation of global evidence maps from all RCTs in MEDLINE.

Abstract

We introduce Trialstreamer, a living database of clinical trial reports. Here we mainly describe the evidence extraction component; this extracts from biomedical abstracts key pieces of information that clinicians need when appraising the literature, and also the relations between these. Specifically, the system extracts descriptions of trial participants, the treatments compared in each arm (the interventions), and which outcomes were measured. The system then attempts to infer which interventions were reported to work best by determining their relationship with identified trial outcome measures. In addition to summarizing individual trials, these extracted data elements allow automatic synthesis of results across many trials on the same topic. We apply the system at scale to all reports of randomized controlled trials indexed in MEDLINE, powering the automatic generation of evidence maps, which provide a global view of the efficacy of different interventions combining data from all relevant clinical trials on a topic. We make all code and models freely available alongside a demonstration of the web interface.