Knowledge discovery from patient forums: gaining novel medical insights from patient experiences

Abstract

Patients share valuable advice and experiences with their peers in online patient discussion groups. These uncensored experiences can provide a complementaryperspective to that of the health professional and thereby yield novel hypotheses which could be tested in further rigorous medical research. This thesis focuses on the development of automatic extraction methods to harvest these patient experiences from online patient forums using text mining techniques. We also examine the complementary value of these patient-reported outcomes to traditional sources of medical knowledge for scientific hypothesis generation. Specifically, we focus on the extraction of adverse drug events (i.e., side effects) and coping strategies for dealing with adverse drug events. Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog