CLEF Simulator Prototype v1.10.19 Jan 2006 (requires MS Access 2002)
Note: A reimplementation of the simulator in JAVA is under construction and may be released here mid 2006
The CLEF Simulator is a software device that simulates the interaction between an intelligent virtual patient, their virtual disease, and intelligent virtual clinical services. Its primary purpose is as a tool to generate plausible information with which to populate a prototype structure for storing medical records: the CLEF Chronicle. By plausible is meant similar in detail and complexity to real clinical records.
Populating the Chronicle prototype is necessary both as a means to verify whether its object model is sufficient, to explore the most appropriate technologies for storing large numbers of chronicle objects in a repository, and to develop and demonstrate appropriate interfaces that would allow clinicians to construct and execute clinically useful queries over such a repository.
Disclaimer: this simulator is NOT intended as a faithful in silico model. It does not claim to be sufficiently accurate such thiat it might be used to model the effect of e.g. new treatments or clinical service reconfigurations on outcomes in real populations. Its sole purpose is to create individual simulated stories that are plausible.
The output of each simulation run is :
The Simulator software can be used to create, as a batch process or series of batch processes, a collection of several thousand simulated patient records, where each record is stored in CLEF Chronicle format.
The prototype includes a rudimentary query generator, allowing users to frame simple research questions (e.g. how long do patients survive) and receive a graphical answer in the form of a Kaplan-Meier survival curve.
January 2006