Comparing NLP Systems to Extract Entities of Eligibility Criteria in Dietary Supplements Clinical Trials Using NLP-ADAPT

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been used extensively to extract concepts from unstructured clinical trial eligibility criteria. Recruiting patients whose information in Electronic Health Records matches clinical trial eligibility criteria can potentially facilitate and accelerate the clinical trial recruitment process. However, a significant obstacle is identifying an efficient Named Entity Recognition (NER) system to parse the clinical trial eligibility criteria. In this study, we used NLP-ADAPT (Artifact Discovery and Preparation Toolkit) to compare existing biomedical NLP systems (BiomedICUS, CLAMP, cTAKES and MetaMap) and their Boolean ensemble to identify entities of the eligibility criteria of 150 randomly selected Dietary Supplement (DS) clinical trials. We created a custom mapping of the gold standard annotated entities to UMLS semantic types to align with annotations from each system. All systems in NLP-ADAPT used their default pipelines to extract entities based on our custom mappings. The systems performed reasonably well in extracting UMLS concepts belonging to the semantic types Disorders and Chemicals and Drugs. Among all systems, cTAKES was the highest performing system for Chemicals and Drugs and Disorders semantic groups and BioMedICUS was the highest performing system for Procedures, Living Beings, Concepts and Ideas, and Devices. Whereas, the Boolean ensemble outperformed individual systems. This study sets a baseline that can be potentially improved with modifications to the NLP-ADAPT pipeline.