Complex analyses on clinical information systems using restricted natural language querying to resolve time-event dependencies.

PURPOSE

This paper reports on a generic framework to provide clinicians with the ability to conduct complex analyses on elaborate research topics using cascaded queries to resolve internal time-event dependencies in the research questions, as an extension to the proposed Clinical Data Analytics Language (CliniDAL).

METHODS

A cascaded query model is proposed to resolve internal time-event dependencies in the queries which can have up to five levels of criteria starting with a query to define subjects to be admitted into a study, followed by a query to define the time span of the experiment. Three more cascaded queries can be required to define control groups, control variables and output variables which all together simulate a real scientific experiment. According to the complexity of the research questions, the cascaded query model has the flexibility of merging some lower level queries for simple research questions or adding a nested query to each level to compose more complex queries. Three different scenarios (one of them contains two studies) are described and used for evaluation of the proposed solution.

RESULTS

CliniDAL's complex analyses solution enables answering complex queries with time-event dependencies at most in a few hours which manually would take many days.

CONCLUSION

An evaluation of results of the research studies based on the comparison between CliniDAL and SQL solutions reveals high usability and efficiency of CliniDAL's solution.