HealthTree Research: Helping Myeloma Patients Match Clinical Trials With AI

This week, the HealthTree Research team presented groundbreaking research at the European Hematology Association (EHA) Congress in Milan, Italy.  In this article, you’ll learn how artificial intelligence (AI) can help patients with multiple myeloma find clinical trials that match their medical needs. 

Barriers to access clinical trials

Clinical trials are essential for testing new therapies and offering additional care options. However, patients often face more challenges when looking to participate in one. This is sometimes due to the inclusion criteria being complex, inconsistent, or hard to interpret. This makes it difficult for both patients and healthcare providers to find the right trials.

Understanding and meeting a clinical trial’s eligibility rules is one of the biggest barriers to enrollment. Simplifying and organizing this information is a key step toward making trials more accessible.

Making clinical trial matching easier for myeloma patients

The HealthTree research team developed an AI-based system to help solve this problem. By analyzing 125 clinical trials, the researchers identified 2,571 individual eligibility rules. These rules were sorted into 103 types, such as age limits and performance status.

Image retrieved from the HealthTree poster presented, EHA-6002: AI-Driven Structuring of Eligibility Criteria to Enhance Patient Recruitment in Multiple Myeloma Clinical Trials

The AI system used a method called vector search and a scoring system known as cosine similarity to accurately match patient data with trial requirements. This approach allowed the AI to read and interpret text, then turn it into clear, structured queries (like a checklist) to compare against patient information in the HealthTree Cure Hub Registry.

The AI achieved:

• 97.7% accuracy in identifying performance status criteria (often measured by the ECOG scale, which reflects a patient’s daily functioning ability).

• 94% accuracy in interpreting age-related requirements.

These measurements are important because performance status and age are common filters in trial participation. High accuracy helps ensure patients are matched appropriately without missing out due to technical oversights.

A better match means more opportunities to enter a clinical trial

When clinical trial criteria are clearly defined and connected to real-world patient data, matching can happen more quickly and with fewer errors. This not only saves time but also increases the chances of a patient enrolling in a study that may offer access to new therapies. This new AI-driven process can assist patients, caregivers, and doctors by reducing the manual effort needed to search for relevant trials. It can also make the recruitment more efficient for researchers and clinicians, which helps accelerate multiple myeloma research.

HealthTree research is powered by our community, and recognized on the global stage.

The international stage highlights the significance of this work and its contribution to blood cancer research. This research study was led by a collaborative team and supported by HealthTree’s technology and data platform, CureHub. It would not have been possible without the involvement of the multiple myeloma community, especially the patients and caregivers who shared their data.

This project is a direct result of the contributions made by patients using CureHub. By sharing their health information, these individuals help power research that leads to improved care options. Every data point shared helps uncover patterns that benefit the larger multiple myeloma community.

CureHub is designed to securely store and use patient data for research that supports faster, more accurate results. The system respects privacy while amplifying each patient's impact.

Next steps

Future efforts will focus on labeling more trials and refining how eligibility rules are extracted. This progress may lead to better integration with electronic health records and even more precise trial matches. By bridging the gap between real-world data and research requirements, HealthTree aims to make clinical trials more accessible for every multiple myeloma patient. 

You can too contribute to life-saving research by creating a free account and securely connecting your medical records. Click the button below to get started. 

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