Facilitating healthcare decisions by assessing the certainty in the evidence from preclinical animal studies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Laboratory animal studies are used in a wide range of human health related research areas, such as basic biomedical research, drug research, experimental surgery and environmental health. The results of these studies can be used to inform decisions regarding clinical research in humans, for example the decision to proceed to clinical trials. If the research question relates to potential harms with no expectation of benefit (e.g., toxicology), studies in experimental animals may provide the only relevant or controlled data and directly inform clinical management decisions. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important tools to provide robust and informative evidence summaries of these animal studies. Rating how certain we are about the evidence could provide important information about the translational probability of findings in experimental animal studies to clinical practice and probably improve it. Evidence summaries and certainty in the evidence ratings could also be used (1) to support selection of interventions with best therapeutic potential to be tested in clinical trials, (2) to justify a regulatory decision limiting human exposure (to drug or toxin), or to (3) support decisions on the utility of further animal experiments. The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach is the most widely used framework to rate the certainty in the evidence and strength of health care recommendations. Here we present how the GRADE approach could be used to rate the certainty in the evidence of preclinical animal studies in the context of therapeutic interventions. We also discuss the methodological challenges that we identified, and for which further work is needed. Examples are defining the importance of consistency within and across animal species and using GRADE's indirectness domain as a tool to predict translation from animal models to humans.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it