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In the Eligibility Criteria View, each trial is shown on a single row and the dimensions that represent eligibility criteria are displayed as columns.

Eligibility criteria are represented according to the type of variable, currently we are displaying two types of variable: Continuous and dichotomous. Continuous variables are displayed by glyphs to accommodate precise comparative operators variations (e.g., “greater than”, “greater than or equal to”, “less than”, etc.). The glyphs allow the representation of values when an explicit upper or lower limit was not mentioned in the study. A glyph can be composed of one or two end anchors (either open or closed), a line, and an optional arrow head to indicate direction in the case of open ended value ranges.

When the lower and upper limits of a variable are specified we use a line with either filled or empty circle anchors at each end. An empty circle anchor is used for “less than” or “greater than” operators and a filled circle indicates “less than or equal to” or “greater than or equal to” such as, the gestational age for the trial Connor where the participants recruited varied from “equal to 14 weeks” to “equal to 34 weeks” of pregnancy see Figure below. Note also in the same figure that the specific values for the variables are displayed by hovering on the glyphs.

Using bi-sliders, the user can filter trials based on continuous values. Only those trials that have data values overlapping within the range of the bi-slider will be displayed and other trials will be filtered. See below.

Note that he values for the dichotomous eligibility criteria are represented side by side with continuous variables. We use filled circles to indicate “Yes” (i.e., criterion must be satisfied for inclusion in the trial), empty circles to indicate 'No' (i.e., criterion must not be satisfied for inclusion in the trial), and no circle to indicate “Not specified”.

A user may wish to filter on “Yes”, “No”, for each dichotomous criterion; this feature will be included in later versions of the tool.

We are displaying the size of the trial population using circles of proportional size and the total number of participants across trials is represented at the top of the graph. The number of participants in a trial can be displayed by hovering on top of the circles.

In the left upper part of the Eligibility Criteria View, there are four buttons: “Reset All”, “Select Trials”, “Select Eligibility Criteria” and “Filter Enable/Disable”. “Reset All” reinitializes the state of the application to display all trials again and is commonly used after querying the trials.

“Select Trials” is used to let the user choose the trials to compare. See next figure

“Select Eligibility Criteria” button is used to provide the user with a list of criteria to add to or remove from this view.

“Filtering Enable/Disable” let us to switch between filtering out or graying out trials that do not accomplish the query.