A Cost-Effective Agent for Clinical Trial Assignment

The purpose of a clinical trial is to evaluate a new treatment procedure. When medical researchers conduct a trial, they recruit participants with appropriate medical histories. To select participants, the researchers analyze medical records of the available patients, which has traditionally been a manual procedure. We describe an intelligent agent that helps to select patients for clinical trials. If the available data are insufficient for choosing patients, the agent suggests additional medical tests and finds an ordering of the tests that reduces their total cost.