NIHR Innovation Observatory launches searchable clinical trials database

The National Institute for Health Research’s Innovation Observatory (NIHRIO), based at Newcastle University, has launched a comprehensive database of searchable clinical trials drawing from 11 of the largest clinical trial registries in the world; as well as medical devices, diagnostics and digital applications information from the FDA database.

ScanMedicine is a new searching system that curates data from clinical trial repositories and medical devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It aims to provide healthcare professionals, patients and researchers with easy access to data underpinning health technology innovations.

ScanMedicine is hosted on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform where the system’s infrastructure was built and deployed following AWS best practices. Services and servers are distributed across private and public subnets with the necessary configuration services that are required to achieve decoupling, scalability, reliability and fault tolerance. The system’s architecture was designed based on microservices style where individual services are linked together to form each scheduled tasks pipeline. This style allows the system to be constantly improved in a flexible and scalable manner.

Clinical trial records are captured using web crawlers on a daily basis from multiple clinical trial registries. The crawled data then is scraped and parsed using Natural Language Processing techniques and the outputs get verified and mapped into the data warehouse.

ScanMedicine implementation is compatible with existing commercial and open source technologies. It uses MongoDB, MySQL and ElasticSearch collections of data. Different programming languages are being used to create web services: Python - Java - Recat - NodeJs. Frontend features are implemented using AWS lambda functions.

Maria Pokora, digital programme manager at NIHR Innovation Observatory said: “ScanMedicine is the first clinical trial registry to harness the unlimited computing power of AWS, the world's biggest cloud provider. The benefit of using a cloud services and microservices model is flexibility, where the system can scale on-demand to support workloads and be updated easily to meet new user requirements. It also benefits from the intelligent services provided by the cloud provider, which give insight into our data.”

You can access ScanMedicine at www.scanmedicine.com.