Analysis of temporal constraints in qualitative eligibility criteria of cancer clinical studies

Clinical studies, especially randomized controlled trials, generate gold-standard medical evidence. However, the lack of population representativeness of clinical studies has hampered their generalizability to the real-world population. Overly restrictive qualitative criteria are often applied to exclude patients. In this work, we develop a lexical-pattern-based tool to structure qualitative eligibility criteria with temporal constraints, with which we analyzed over 10,800 cancer clinical studies. Our results showed that restrictive temporal constraints are often applied on qualitative criteria in cancer studies, limiting the generalizability of their results.