Scoping review of the current landscape of AI-based applications in clinical trials

Background: Clinical trials are essential for bringing new drugs, technologies and procedures to the market and clinical practice. Considering the design and the four-phase development, only 10% of them complete the entire process, partly due to the increasing costs and complexity of clinical trials. This low completion rate has a huge negative impact in terms of population health, quality of care and health economics and sustainability. Automating some of the process' tasks with artificial intelligence (AI) tools could optimize some of the most burdensome ones, like patient selection, matching and enrollment; better patient selection could also reduce harmful treatment side effects. Although the pharmaceutical industry is embracing artificial AI tools, there is little evidence in the literature of their application in clinical trials. Methods: To address this issue, we performed a scoping review. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we performed a search on PubMed for articles on the implementation of AI in the development of clinical trials. Results: The search yielded 772 articles, of which 15 were included. The articles were published between 2019 and 2022 and the results were presented descriptively. About half of the studies addressed the topic of patient recruitment; 12 articles reported specific examples of AI applications; five studies presented a quantitative estimate of the effectiveness of these tools. Conclusion: All studies present encouraging results on the implementation of AI-based applications to the development of clinical trials. AI-based applications have a lot of potential, but more studies are needed to validate these tools and facilitate their adoption.