The FACTS (Finding Appropriate Clinical TrialS) project helps breast cancer patients find clinical trails for which they may qualify.

Given some basic clinical information about a patient, FACTS searches a database of clinical trails taken from the National Cancer Institute’s Physician’s Data Query (PDQ) database for potential matches. Breast cancer patients are increasingly participating in decisions about their health and demanding more sources of information about treatment options. Current sources cannot tailor the information for a specific case, making it hard for a patient to find the information she needs. In particular, although patients can obtain on-line information about clinical trials for treatment of breast cancer, they need to browse several complex documents, primarily written fo documents, primarily written fohaving an idea of whether they are potentially eligible for a given trial. Primary care providers cannot always remember which clinical trials are available, what the eligibility criteria are, how the study is designed and which forms, tests, and extra exams are required. Preliminary work on a project aimed at building a health information resource to identify appropriate clinical trials for a patient is presented. The resource is intended for direct patient or primary care provider use, rather than being primarily targeted for the specialist, and consists of a computer-based interactive system for accessing and evaluating breast cancer clinical trial information. The system allows entry of details of a specific case using the WWW. In its current version, the system does not reason with uncertain or incomplete information. It indicates which trials the patient is eligible for and ranks them in an ad-hoc fashion. In the next version, it is planned to include small belief networks that allow imputation of missing values and reasoning with incomplete information. It will be checked whether this addition results in better selection of trials. The system will produce a proxy for the probability that a patient is eligible for any given trial, and will rank the trials accordingly.

FACTS is an ongoing project. At the moment this system is not available online.

Luila Ohno Machado, lohnomac@dsg.harvard.edu

Decision Systems Group, Thorn 309, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, Phone: 617-732-4950, Fax: 617-739-3672