title: Extracting patient demographics and personal medical information from online health forums.
abstract: Natural language processing has been successfully leveraged to extract patient information from unstructured clinical text. However the majority of the existing work targets at obtaining a specific category of clinical information through individual efforts. In the midst of the Health 2.0 wave, online health forums increasingly host abundant and diverse health-related information regarding the demographics and medical information of patients who are either actively participating in or passively reported at these forums. The potential categories of such information span a wide spectrum, whose extraction requires a systematic and comprehensive approach beyond the traditional isolated efforts that specialize in harvesting information of single categories. In this paper, we develop a new integrated biomedical NLP pipeline that automatically extracts a comprehensive set of patient demographics and medical information from online health forums. The pipeline can be adopted to construct structured personal health profiles from unstructured user-contributed content on eHealth social media sites. This paper describes key aspects of the pipeline as well as reports experimental results that show the system's satisfactory performance in accomplishing a series of NLP tasks of extracting patient information from online health forums.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Systems, College of Computing Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology University Heights, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Systems, College of Computing Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology University Heights, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA.
authors.forename: Songhua
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Science and Engineering Center, Health Data Sciences Institute Oak Ridge National Laboratory One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, 37830.
authors.forename: Hong-Jun
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Yoon
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Science and Engineering Center, Health Data Sciences Institute Oak Ridge National Laboratory One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, 37830.
authors.forename: Georgia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tourassi
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003710:Demography; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D061108:Social Media; D012984:Software