Coverage of clinical trials tasks in existing ontologies.

Clinical research trials involve multiple, often simultaneous processes and corresponding data that collectively involve a diverse group of stakeholders. As efforts are ongoing to enable computable clinical trials and harmonize clinical research data, an ontology targeting the domain of clinical research is essential. As part of a larger project to develop a Clinical Trials scheduling and tracking application, the domain coverage of the UMLS and two component ontologies- SNOMED CT, and the NCI Thesaurus-was evaluated in the context of common clinical trial tasks and events. In total, 102 unique activities were abstracted from 20 protocols, representing a variety of domains, and manually mapped to the target ontologies. Coverage ranged from 84% for UMLS to 32% for the NCI Thesaurus.