Natural language processing is becoming ever more important in research. The explosion in interest in LLMs is sparking many opportunities to analyse text data in healthcare, social sciences, and other areas.
We’re proud to announce that the Clinical Trial Risk Tool has been selected as a winner of the Plotly Dash Example Apps Challenge (2023), out of 25 amazing apps submitted by the community.
Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this app uses natural language processing, Plotly Dash, and the spaCy and Scikit-Learn libraries to calculate the risk of a clinical trial failing to deliver informative results. It reads the trial protocol and identifies key features from the text which are fed into a risk model.
Join Plotly’s webinar to see the tool in action! https://tinyurl.com/4zd3emkr
You can try the new version of the app at: https://clinicaltrialrisk.org/tool
You can try version 1.0 of the app (using Plotly Dash) at: https://clinicaltrialrisk.org/tool/login?guest=true/.
Wood TA and McNair D. Clinical Trial Risk Tool: software application using natural language processing to identify the risk of trial uninformativeness. Gates Open Res 2023, 7:56 (https://doi.org/10.12688/gatesopenres.14416.1).
We have improved the Clinical Trial Risk Tool in the last 6 months, making it more user friendly and taking on board the feedback that we’ve received. We’ve improved the accuracy of the machine learning components too. The tool now outputs its key figures such as risk levels and estimated cost in easily readable cards, so you can see at a glance the key takeaways from your protocol: The risk factors are now organised into collapsible categories, so you can explore them easily without an information overload.
Guest post by Safeer Khan, Lecturer at Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan Introduction The success of a clinical trial is strongly dependent on the structure and coordination of the teams managing it. Given the high stakes and significant impact of every decision made during the trial, it is essential for each team member to collaborate efficiently in order to meet strict deadlines, comply with regulations, and ensure reliable results.
Guest post by Youssef Soliman, medical student at Assiut University and biostatistician Clinical trial protocols are detailed master-plans of a study – often 100–200 pages long – outlining objectives, design, procedures, eligibility and analysis. Reading them cover-to-cover can be daunting and time-consuming. Yet careful review is essential. Protocols are the “backbone” of good research, ensuring trials are safe for participants and scientifically valid [1]. Fortunately, there are systematic strategies to speed up review and keep it objective.
