Automatic assessment of patient eligibility by utilizing NLP and rule-based analysis.

Assessment of patient eligibility is an essential process in the clinical trial but there are a lot of manual processes involved. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a promising technique to automate analysing of the massive volume of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) hence it can assist in the assessment of patient eligibility, especially in clinical trials that require complex inclusion/exclusion criteria. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid model which utilized both rule-based and NLP technologies to automate the assessment of patient eligibility. The result showed that the hybrid model had a better trade-off between sensitivity and precision compared to the rule-based model and NLP similarity model. Moreover, the accuracy of the hybrid model was validated on the larger dataset and it reached an accuracy of 87.3%. Therefore, this technique potentially can improve the efficiency of patient recruitment by eliminating the manual processes that involve in the assessment of patient eligibility.

Use of Wearable Sensor Device and Mobile Application for Objective Assessment of Pain in Post-surgical Patients: A Preliminary Study.

Effective post-operative pain management requires an accurate and frequent assessment of the pain experienced by the patients. The current gold-standard of pain assessment is through patient self-evaluation (e.g., numeric rating scale, NRS) which is subjective, prone to recall-bias, and does not provide comprehensive information of the pain intensity and its trends. We conducted a study to explore the potential of wearable biosensors and machine learning-based analysis of physiological parameters to estimate the pain intensity. The results from our study of post-operative knee surgery patients monitored over a period of 30 days demonstrate the feasibility of the system in ambulatory setting, with a substantial agreement (Cohen's Kappa = 0.70, 95% CI 0.68-0.72) between the pain intensity estimation and the patient reported numerical rating scale. Therefore, the wearable biosensors coupled with the machine learning-derived pain estimation are capable of remotely assessing the pain intensity.