ICBO_2018_39: TOCSOC: A temporal ontology for comparing the survival outcomes of clinical trials in oncology

<p>The outcome of clinical trials for cancer is typically summarized in terms of survival. However, different trials for the same disease may use different measures of survival, or use differing vocabulary to refer to the same outcome measure. This makes it harder to automate an objective comparison of treatments. We propose a temporal ontology of survival outcome measures that a) helps to standardize the vocabulary for reporting survival outcomes and b) makes it possible to automatically rank the relative efficacy of different treatments. The approach has been illustrated by examples from the oncology literature. The temporal ontology and the accompanying reasoner are freely available on Github (https://github.com/pdddinakar/TOCSOC)</p>