EvidenceOutcomes: A Dataset of Clinical Trial Publications with Clinically Meaningful Outcomes.

Overview

The fundamental process of evidence extraction in evidence-based medicine relies on identifying PICO elements, with Outcomes being the most complex and often overlooked. To address this, we introduce EvidenceOutcomes, a large annotated corpus of clinically meaningful outcomes. A robust annotation guideline was developed in collaboration with clinicians and NLP experts, and three annotators annotated the Results and Conclusions of 500 PubMed abstracts and 140 EBM-NLP abstracts, achieving an inter-rater agreement of 0.76. A fine-tuned PubMedBERT model achieved F1 scores of 0.69 (entity level) and 0.76 (token level). EvidenceOutcomes offers a benchmark for advancing machine learning algorithms in extracting clinically meaningful outcomes.