TimeTox: An LLM-Based Pipeline for Automated Extraction of Time Toxicity from Clinical Trial Protocols

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Main Authors: Vinjamuri, Saketh, Loperena, Marielle Fis, Spezia, Marie C., Kouzy, Ramez
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Vinjamuri, Saketh
Loperena, Marielle Fis
Spezia, Marie C.
Kouzy, Ramez
author_facet Vinjamuri, Saketh
Loperena, Marielle Fis
Spezia, Marie C.
Kouzy, Ramez
contents Time toxicity, the cumulative healthcare contact days from clinical trial participation, is an important but labor-intensive metric to extract from protocol documents. We developed TimeTox, an LLM-based pipeline for automated extraction of time toxicity from Schedule of Assessments tables. TimeTox uses Google's Gemini models in three stages: summary extraction from full-length protocol PDFs, time toxicity quantification at six cumulative timepoints for each treatment arm, and multi-run consensus via position-based arm matching. We validated against 20 synthetic schedules (240 comparisons) and assessed reproducibility on 644 real-world oncology protocols. Two architectures were compared: single-pass (vanilla) and two-stage (structure-then-count). The two-stage pipeline achieved 100% clinically acceptable accuracy ($\pm$3 days) on synthetic data (MAE 0.81 days) versus 41.5% for vanilla (MAE 9.0 days). However, on real-world protocols, the vanilla pipeline showed superior reproducibility: 95.3% clinically acceptable accuracy (IQR $\leq$ 3 days) across 3 runs on 644 protocols, with 82.0% perfect stability (IQR = 0). The production pipeline extracted time toxicity for 1,288 treatment arms across multiple disease sites. Extraction stability on real-world data, rather than accuracy on synthetic benchmarks, is the decisive factor for production LLM deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21335
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TimeTox: An LLM-Based Pipeline for Automated Extraction of Time Toxicity from Clinical Trial Protocols
Vinjamuri, Saketh
Loperena, Marielle Fis
Spezia, Marie C.
Kouzy, Ramez
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Time toxicity, the cumulative healthcare contact days from clinical trial participation, is an important but labor-intensive metric to extract from protocol documents. We developed TimeTox, an LLM-based pipeline for automated extraction of time toxicity from Schedule of Assessments tables. TimeTox uses Google's Gemini models in three stages: summary extraction from full-length protocol PDFs, time toxicity quantification at six cumulative timepoints for each treatment arm, and multi-run consensus via position-based arm matching. We validated against 20 synthetic schedules (240 comparisons) and assessed reproducibility on 644 real-world oncology protocols. Two architectures were compared: single-pass (vanilla) and two-stage (structure-then-count). The two-stage pipeline achieved 100% clinically acceptable accuracy ($\pm$3 days) on synthetic data (MAE 0.81 days) versus 41.5% for vanilla (MAE 9.0 days). However, on real-world protocols, the vanilla pipeline showed superior reproducibility: 95.3% clinically acceptable accuracy (IQR $\leq$ 3 days) across 3 runs on 644 protocols, with 82.0% perfect stability (IQR = 0). The production pipeline extracted time toxicity for 1,288 treatment arms across multiple disease sites. Extraction stability on real-world data, rather than accuracy on synthetic benchmarks, is the decisive factor for production LLM deployment.
title TimeTox: An LLM-Based Pipeline for Automated Extraction of Time Toxicity from Clinical Trial Protocols
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21335