Mining Adverse Drug Reactions from online healthcare forums using Hidden Markov Model

Background Adverse Drug Reactions are one of the leading causes of injury or death among patients undergoing medical treatments. Not all Adverse Drug Reactions are identified before a drug is made available in the market. Current post-marketing drug surveillance methods, which are based purely on voluntary spontaneous reports, are unable to provide the early indications necessary to prevent the occurrence of such injuries or fatalities. The objective of this research is to extract reports of adverse drug side-effects from messages in online healthcare forums and use them as early indicators to assist in post-marketing drug surveillance. Methods We treat the task of extracting adverse side-effects of drugs from healthcare forum messages as a sequence labeling problem and present a Hidden Markov Model(HMM) based Text Mining system that can be used to classify a message as containing drug side-effect information and then extract the adverse side-effect mentions from it. A manually annotated dataset from http://www.medications.comis used in the training and validation of the HMM based Text Mining system. Results A 10-fold cross-validation on the manually annotated dataset yielded on average an F-Score of 0.76 from the HMM Classifier, in comparison to 0.575 from the Baseline classifier. Without the Plain Text Filter component as a part of the Text Processing module, the F-Score of the HMM Classifier was reduced to 0.378 on average, while absence of the HTML Filter component was found to have no impact. Reducing the Drug names dictionary size by half, on average reduced the F-Score of the HMM Classifier to 0.359, while a similar reduction to the side-effects dictionary yielded an F-Score of 0.651 on average. Adverse side-effects mined from http://www.medications.comand http://www.steadyhealth.comwere found to match the Adverse Drug Reactions on the Drug Package Labels of several drugs. In addition, some novel adverse side-effects, which can be potential Adverse Drug Reactions, were also identified. Conclusions The results from the HMM based Text Miner are encouraging to pursue further enhancements to this approach. The mined novel side-effects can act as early indicators for health authorities to help focus their efforts in post-marketing drug surveillance.The authors would like to acknowledge the support from National Science Foundation awards IIS-0644366 and OIA-1028098, and KU General Research Fund GRF-2301677

Systematic review on the prevalence, frequency and comparative value of adverse events data in social media

Aim: The aim of this review was to summarize the prevalence, frequency and comparative value of information on the adverse events of healthcare interventions from user comments and videos in social media. Methods: A systematic review of assessments of the prevalence or type of information on adverse events in social media was undertaken. Sixteen databases and two internet search engines were searched in addition to handsearching, reference checking and contacting experts. The results were sifted independently by two researchers. Data extraction and quality assessment were carried out by one researcher and checked by a second. The quality assessment tool was devised in-house and a narrative synthesis of the results followed. Results: From 3064 records, 51 studies met the inclusion criteria. The studies assessed over 174 social media sites with discussion forums (71%) being the most popular. The overall prevalence of adverse events reports in social media varied from 0.2% to 8% of posts. Twenty-nine studies compared the results from searching social media with using other data sources to identify adverse events. There was general agreement that a higher frequency of adverse events was found in social media and that this was particularly true for ‘symptom’ related and ‘mild’ adverse events. Those adverse events that were under-represented in social media were laboratory-based and serious adverse events. Conclusions: Reports of adverse events are identifiable within social media. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in the frequency and type of events reported, and the reliability or validity of the data has not been thoroughly evaluated

Knowledge Discovery and Hypothesis Generation from Online Patient Forums: A Research Proposal

The unprompted patient experiences shared on patient forums contain a wealth of unexploited knowledge. Mining this knowledge and cross-linking it with biomedical literature, could expose novel insights, which could subsequently provide hypotheses for further clinical research. As of yet, automated methods for open knowledge discovery on patient forum text are lacking. Thus, in this research proposal, we outline future research into methods for mining, aggregating and cross-linking patient knowledge from online forums. Additionally, we aim to address how one could measure the credibility of this extracted knowledge.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Developing a hybrid hidden MARKOV model using fusion of ARMA model and artificial neural network for crude oil price forecasting

Crude oil price forecasting is an important component of sustainable development of many countries as crude oil is an unavoidable product that exist on earth. Crude oil price forecasting plays a very vital role in economic development of many countries in the world today. Any fluctuation in crude oil price tremendously affects many economies in terms of budget and expenditure. In view of this, it is of great concern by economists and financial analysts to forecast such a vital commodity. However, Hidden Markov Model, ARMA Model and Artificial Neural Network has many drawbacks in forecasting such as linear limitations of ARMA model which is in contrast to the financial time series which are often nonlinear, ANN is very weak in terms of out-sample forecast and it has very tedious process of implementation, HMM is very weak in an in-sample forecast and has issue of a large number of unstructured parameters. In view of this drawbacks of these three models (ANN, ARMA and HMM), we developed an efficient Hybrid Hidden Markov Model using fusion of ARMA Model and Artificial Neural Network for crude oil price forecasting, MATLAB was employed to develop the four models (Hybrid HMM, HMM, ARMA and ANN). The models were evaluated using three different evaluation techniques which are Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Absolute Error (AE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The findings showed that Hybrid Hidden Markov Model was found to provide more accurate crude oil price forecast than the other three models in which. The results of this study indicate that Hybrid Hidden Markov Model using fusion of ARMA and ANN is a potentially promising model for crude oil price forecasting

Framing, Advice-Seeking, and Medical Trust in the r/Keto Community: An Analysis of the Medical Flair on r/Keto

First created in 1921, the ketogenic diet was used as a medical intervention for children suffering from severe epilepsy. However, in recent years, this highly restrictive diet has gained mainstream popularity for a number of illness management, wellness, and weight loss uses. Despite its rise in use and popularity, mainstream medical opinion still views the ketogenic diet as a last resort for severe conditions. Using a content analysis of posts tagged with the “medical” flair on the subreddit “r/Keto,” this thesis found commonalities among posts which praised the ketogenic diet and shared positive personal anecdotes were the most likely to receive positive engagement from the community. These findings are in line with similar studies of both online medical communities and online diet and weight loss communities and the positive social effects those communities can have for users