Leveraging Large Language Models for Clinical Trial Eligibility Criteria Classification

The advent of transformer technology and large language models (LLMs) has further broadened the already extensive application field of artificial intelligence (AI). A large portion of medical records is stored in text format, such as clinical trial texts. Part of these texts is information regarding eligibility criteria. We aimed to harness the immense capabilities of an LLM by fine-tuning an open-source LLM (Llama-2) to develop a classifier from the clinical trial data. We were interested in investigating whether a fine-tuned LLM could better decide the eligibility criteria from the clinical trial text and compare the results with a more traditional method. Such an investigation can help us determine the extent to which we can rely on text-based applications developed from large language models and possibly open new avenues of application in the medical domain. Our results are comparable to the best-performing methods for this task. Since we used state-of-the-art technology, this research has the potential to open new avenues in the field of LLM application in the healthcare sector.