Millions of dollars are spent annually on the conduct of clinical trials, yet the results of many large and important trials are published only as text-based articles that both practitioners and researchers have difficulty finding, interpreting, or applying to clinical practice. The result is an inefficient transfer of evidence from the research world to the clinic, and a waste of precious resources.

The Trial Bank Project captures the design, execution and result information from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) directly into computer-understandable "trial banks," in order to enable more powerful knowledge management and automated discovery of clinical trial information, as well as more powerful decision support for trial quality assessment and evidence-based practice. We seek to capture trial information from any point during the life-cycle of a clinical trial, but primarily by changing the way clinical trials are published in the academic medical literature. We demonstrated proof of concept of "trial-bank publishing" in collaboration with the Annals of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Trial Bank Project also collaborates with the National Center for Biomedical Ontology and the Electronic Primary Care and Research Network. Details of the project are available here.

Principal Investigator Ida Sim, MD, PhD

Informatics Research

Trial Reporting

Trial Visualization

OCRe

the Ontology of Clinical Research

ERGO

the Eligibility Rule Grammar and Ontology

HSDB

the CTSA Human Studies Database project

RuleEd

Rule Editor Prototype

RCT Schema

the data model for trial bank software

Task Analysis of Systematic Reviewing

design approach for trial banks

RCT Presenter

browse a trial bank

Bank-a-Trial

submit a trial

CONSORT Plus Trial-Bank Reporting Guidelines

extension of CONSORT to trial-bank publishing

CTSearch

use tag clouds to search ClinicalTrials.gov

Stand-alone CTeXplorer

download prototype and compare a set of MTCT of HIV trials

On-line CTeXplorer

upload trial data in XML and visualize