Tri-AL: VisuAL ClinicAL TriALs

Clinicaltrials.gov is a website that people all around the world submit the progress and the information of the medical trials on it. Tir-AL is a visualization platform to keep track of clinicaltrials.gov data along with more valuable tools. Tri-AL allows clinicaltrials researchers explore the database in a novel way. It can be used as both standalone project and a baseline for further improvement. It is still under development and we are trying to make it as perfect as possible.

Setup

1. Activate environment and install all requirements using pip command and requirements.txt file.

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Intialize database and setting up project.

chmod +x initdb.sh
./initdb.sh

3. Download the concent of clinicaltrials.gov from here as a zip file to initialize database.

4. Unzip the AllPublicXML.zip and place the content under data directory in the project root. For example data/AllPublicXML/.

5. Import all the XML files to the database.

python3 data_manager.py import -i data/AllPublicXML

6. Update config file by using sample cofing file. The config file is located in visual/sample-config.yml. Name config to config.yml in the same directoy. It can be done as following as well:

cp visual/sample-config.yml visual/config.yml
# EDIT config.yml WITH ANY EDITOR

7. Start project using Django and access it through browser!

python3 manage.py runserver

Project Structure

.
├── panels                  # Internal app for tri-al project that contains core of the server
│   ├── api                 # Files that are responsible for REST-API to communicate with front-end
│   └── utils               # Scripts to download and parse clinicaltrials.gov data and insert them into database
├── visual                  # Configuration files for Django app
├── schedulers              # bash scripts for scheduling tasks such as, updating database
├── initdb.sh               # Script to reset the database and make a new one with default values
├── httpd.conf              # Backup file of apache configuration for app
├── data_manager.py         # Main script to maintain database and download and fill database
├── manage.py               # Django script to perform different actions for app
└── .gitignore