Automated Extraction of Number of Subjects in Randomised Controlled Trials

06/22/2016

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by   Abeed Sarker, et al.

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We present a simple approach for automatically extracting the number of subjects involved in randomised controlled trials (RCT). Our approach first applies a set of rule-based techniques to extract candidate study sizes from the abstracts of the articles. Supervised classification is then performed over the candidates with support vector machines, using a small set of lexical, structural, and contextual features. With only a small annotated training set of 201 RCTs, we obtained an accuracy of 88%. We believe that this system will aid complex medical text processing tasks such as summarisation and question answering.