Recommending Clinical Trials for Online Patient Cases using Artificial Intelligence
This addresses recruitment challenges in clinical trials for patients and organizers by leveraging online platforms, though it is incremental as it applies an existing LLM method to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of matching online patient cases to clinical trials for recruitment, using the TrialGPT framework based on a large language model, and found it outperformed traditional keyword-based searches by 46% in identifying eligible trials, with an average of about 7 eligible trials per patient.
Clinical trials are crucial for assessing new treatments; however, recruitment challenges - such as limited awareness, complex eligibility criteria, and referral barriers - hinder their success. With the growth of online platforms, patients increasingly turn to social media and health communities for support, research, and advocacy, expanding recruitment pools and established enrollment pathways. Recognizing this potential, we utilized TrialGPT, a framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) as its backbone, to match 50 online patient cases (collected from published case reports and a social media website) to clinical trials and evaluate performance against traditional keyword-based searches. Our results show that TrialGPT outperforms traditional methods by 46% in identifying eligible trials, with each patient, on average, being eligible for around 7 trials. Additionally, our outreach efforts to case authors and trial organizers regarding these patient-trial matches yielded highly positive feedback, which we present from both perspectives.