EXACT — Clinical Trial Matching Engine

EXACT (EXtracting Attributes from Clinical Trials) is a stateless search and matching engine for clinical trials. It connects to an external database that holds the trial catalog and reference data — EXACT does not own or manage that data.

Patient profiles are passed inline with each API request. They can also be retrieved from an external database that has a PatientInfo table in the form implemented by CTOMOP, which exposes a flat projection of a patient record from underlying OMOP tables.

API_SURFACE.md — full REST API reference (endpoints, patient context schema, query params, response shapes).

Documentation

Doc	Description
docs/overview.md	Architecture, key components, data flow
docs/trials4patients.md	Running trial search for patients
docs/evaluator.md	Evaluating EXACT results against ground truth
docs/setup.md	Local development setup
API_SURFACE.md	REST API reference

Running trial search for patients

To match patients from an external patient database against the trial catalog without a running web server:

export TRIALS_DATABASE_URL=postgresql://...
export PATIENT_DATABASE_URL=postgresql://...

bash scripts/trials4patients.sh

See docs/trials4patients.md for all options and output structure.

Evaluating results

To score EXACT results against a ground-truth CSV:

RESULTS_CSV=results.csv bash scripts/trials4patients.sh
bash scripts/evaluator/evaluate.sh scripts/evaluator/ground_truth.csv results.csv

See docs/evaluator.md for metrics, full workflow, and output options.

Quick start (connecting to an existing trials database)

pip install -r requirements.txt

# Local DB for auth/tokens only
python manage.py migrate

# Point to the external trials database
export TRIALS_DATABASE_URL=postgresql://readonly:[email protected]:5432/trials

python manage.py runserver

Quick start (standalone / local development)

When no external trials database is configured, EXACT falls back to a single local database for everything — useful for development and testing:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py seed_reference_data
python manage.py runserver

Once the server is running, search for trials with curl:

curl -s -H "Authorization: Token <your-token>" \
  'http://localhost:8000/trials/?type=eligible' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"patientInfo": {"disease": "multiple myeloma", "patientAge": 55, "gender": "M"}}' | python -m json.tool

See docs/setup.md for full setup instructions, environment variables, secrets management, and test configuration.