Personal Health Record feeding via Medical Forums

The huge amount of textual data uploaded in virtual social networks can be effectively exploited to provide (possibly accidental) information in many scenarios. In healthcare discussion forums, users interact to educate themselves about treatments, symptoms, diseases, therapies, usually providing personal health-related information when posting questions or answers. Medical Forum data can be used for feeding Personal Health Record (PHR), the part of EHR where the person can directly manage his personal medical-related information. In this work, we propose an agent-based architecture to first extract textual data from html pages in a set of medical oriented Italian social forum. Then, text mining techniques allow to discover health related information coming from the same user in different threads and/or different forums, finally feeding the PHR with such information. The architecture is presented together with a first implementation where 10 medical discussion forums are analyzed, showing promising results when extracting medical information from a subset of 3 over 10 forums.

[1]  Huan Liu,et al.  Twitter Data Analytics , 2013, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science.

[2]  Bruce R. Schatz,et al.  Resolving healthcare forum posts via similar thread retrieval , 2014, BCB.

[3]  Amit Singh,et al.  Retrieving similar discussion forum threads: a structure based approach , 2012, SIGIR '12.

[4]  Tomek Strzalkowski,et al.  Modeling Socio-Cultural Phenomena in Online Multi-Party Discourse , 2011, Analyzing Microtext.

[5]  Tuija Virtanen,et al.  Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication , 2013 .

[6]  Illhoi Yoo,et al.  Data Mining in Healthcare and Biomedicine: A Survey of the Literature , 2012, Journal of Medical Systems.

[7]  Subhash Bhalla,et al.  Semantic interoperability in standardized electronic health record databases , 2012, JDIQ.

[8]  Reinhold Haux,et al.  Health information systems - past, present, future , 2006, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[9]  Stefan Trausan-Matu,et al.  Automatic forum analysis: a thorough method of assessing the importance of posts, discussion threads and of users' involvement , 2012, WIMS '12.

[10]  Susan Gauch,et al.  ChatTrack: Chat Room Topic Detection Using Classification , 2004, ISI.

[11]  Andreas Abecker,et al.  Towards Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management , 2003, AMKM.

[12]  T. S. Raghu,et al.  Personal Health Records (PHR) and the future of the physician-patient relationship , 2011, iConference.

[13]  William R. Hersh,et al.  A survey of current work in biomedical text mining , 2005, Briefings Bioinform..

[14]  Arthur L. Norberg,et al.  Credits for the Information Highway. (Book Reviews: Transforming Computer Technology. Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986.; Where Wizards Stay Up Late. The Origins of the Internet.) , 1996 .

[15]  Qiang Yang,et al.  Collaborative boosting for activity classification in microblogs , 2013, KDD.

[16]  Hang Li,et al.  An Information Retrieval Approach to Short Text Conversation , 2014, ArXiv.

[17]  Andreas Abecker,et al.  Agent-mediated knowledge management : International Symposium AMKM 2003, Stanford, CA, USA, March 24-26, 2003 : revised and invited papers , 2004 .

[18]  Yau-Yuen Yeung.  Macroscopic study of the social networks formed in web-based discussion forums , 2005, CSCL.

[19]  Yue Lu,et al.  Unsupervised discovery of opposing opinion networks from forum discussions , 2012, CIKM '12.

[20]  P. Mutton.  Inferring and visualizing social networks on Internet relay chat , 2004 .