Experiments on the Automated Selection of Patients for Clinical Trials

When clinicians test a new treatment procedure, they need to identify and recruit patients with appropriate medical conditions. We have developed an expert system that helps clinicians to select patients for experimental treatments, and to reduce the number and overall cost of related medical tests. We describe experiments on selecting patients for new treatments at the Moffitt Cancer Center. The experiments have shown that the system can increase the number of selected patients by a factor of three, and that it can also reduce the cost of the selection process.