Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Apr 29, 2019)
Date Submitted: Jul 3, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Measuring Relevant Information in Health Social Network Conversations and Clinical Diagnosis Cases
Background:
Internet and Social media is an enormous source of information. Health Social Networks and online collaborative environments enable users to create shared content that afterwards can be discussed. While social media discussions for health related matters constitute a potential source of knowledge, characterizing the relevance of participations from different users is a challenging task.
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to present a methodology designed for quantifying relevant information provided by different participants in clinical online discussions.
Methods:
A set of key indicators for different aspects of clinical conversations and specific clinical contributions within a discussion have been defined. These indicators make use of biomedical knowledge extraction based on standard terminologies and ontologies. These indicators allow measuring the relevance of information of each participant of the clinical conversation.
Results:
Proposed indicators have been applied to two discussions extracted from PatientsLikeMe, as well as to two real clinical cases from the Sanar collaborative discussion system. Results obtained from indicators in the tested cases have been compared with clinical expert opinions to check indicators validity.
Conclusions:
The methodology has been successfully used for describing participant interactions in real clinical cases belonging to a collaborative clinical case discussion tool and from a conversation from a Health Social Network.
Citation
