An official website of the United States government
Every day patients access and generate online health content through a variety of online channels, creating an ever-expanding sea of data in the form of digital communications. At the same time, proponents of public health have recently called for timely, granular, and actionable data to address a range of public health issues, stressing the need for social listening platforms that can identify and compile this valuable data. Yet previous attempts at social listening in healthcare have yielded mixed results, largely because they have failed to incorporate sufficient context to understand the communications they seek to analyze. Guided by Activity Theory to design HealthSense, we propose a platform for efficiently sensing and gathering data across the web for real time analysis to support public health outcomes. HealthSense couples theory-guided content analysis and graph propagation with graph neural networks (GNNs) to assess the relevance and credibility of information, as well as intelligently navigate the complex online channel landscape, leading to significant improvements over existing social listening tools. We demonstrate the value of our artifact in gathering information to support two important exemplar public health tasks: 1) performing post market drug surveillance for adverse reactions and 2) addressing the opioid crisis by monitoring for potent synthetic opioids released into communities. Our results across data, user, and event experiments show that effective design artifacts can enable better outcomes across both automated and human decision-making contexts, making social listening for public health possible, practical, and valuable. Through our design process, we extend Activity Theory to address the complexities of modern online communication platforms, where information resides not only within the collection of individual communication activities, but in the complex network of interactions between them.
more »
« less
PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text
The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients’ demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1750978
- PAR ID:
- 10407986
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5571–5587
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
d public health. For such high-impact areas, accurately capturing relevant entities at a more granular level is critical, as this information influences real-world processes. On the other hand, training NER models for a specific domain without handcrafted features requires an extensive amount of labeled data, which is expensive in human effort and time. In this study, we employ distant supervision utilizing a domain-specific ontology to reduce the need for human labor and train models incorporating domain-specific (e.g., drug use) external knowledge to recognize domain specific entities. We capture entities related the drug use and their trends in government epidemiology reports, with an improvement of 8% in F1-score.more » « less
-
Off-label drug use is an important healthcare topic as it is quite common and sometimes inevitable in medical practice. Though gaining information about off-label drug uses could benefit a lot of healthcare stakeholders such as patients, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies, there is no such data repository of such information available. There is a desire for a systematic approach to detect off-label drug uses. Other than using data sources such as EHR and clinical notes that are provided by healthcare providers, we exploited social media data especially online health community (OHC) data to detect the off-label drug uses, with consideration of the increasing social media users and the large volume of valuable and timely user-generated contents. We adopted tensor decomposition technique, CP decomposition in this work, to deal with the sparsity and missing data problem in social media data. On the basis of tensor decomposition results, we used two approaches to identify off-label drug use candidates: (1) one is via ranking the CP decomposition resulting components, (2) the other one is applying a heterogeneous network mining method, proposed in our previous work [9], on the reconstructed dataset by CP decomposition. The first approach identified a number of significant off-label use candidates, for which we were able to conduct case studies and found medical explanations for 7 out of 12 identified off-label use candidates. The second approach achieved better performance than the previous method [9] by improving the F1-score by 3%. It demonstrated the effectiveness of performing tensor decomposition on social media data for detecting off-label drug use.more » « less
-
Off-label drug use refers to using marketed drugs for indications that are not listed in their FDA labeling information. Such uses are very common and sometimes inevitable in clinical practice. To some extent, off-label drug uses provide a pathway for clinical innovation, however, they could cause serious adverse effects due to lacking scientific research and tests. Since identifying the off-label uses can provide a clue to the stakeholders including healthcare providers, patients, and medication manufacturers to further the investigation on drug efficacy and safety, it raises the demand for a systematic way to detect off-label uses. Given data contributed by health consumers in online health communities (OHCs), we developed an automated approach to detect off-label drug uses based on heterogeneous network mining. We constructed a heterogeneous healthcare network with medical entities (e.g. disease, drug, adverse drug reaction) mined from the text corpus, which involved 50 diseases, 1,297 drugs, and 185 ADRs, and determined 13 meta paths between the drugs and diseases. We developed three metrics to represent the meta-path-based topological features. With the network features, we trained the binary classifiers built on Random Forest algorithm to recognize the known drug-disease associations. The best classification model that used lift to measure path weights obtained F1-score of 0.87, based on which, we identified 1,009 candidates of off-label drug uses and examined their potential by searching evidence from PubMed and FAERS.more » « less
-
Pretraining molecular representations is crucial for drug and material discovery. Recent methods focus on learning representations from geometric structures, effectively capturing 3D position information. Yet, they overlook the rich information in biomedical texts, which detail molecules’ properties and substructures. With this in mind, we set up a data collection effort for 200K pairs of ground-state geometric structures and biomedical texts, resulting in a PubChem3D dataset. Based on this dataset, we propose the GeomCLIP framework to enhance geometric pretraining and understanding by biomedical texts. During pre-training, we design two types of tasks, i.e., multimodal representation alignment and unimodal denoising pretraining, to align the 3D geometric encoder with textual information and, at the same time, preserve its original representation power. Experimental results show the effectiveness of GeomCLIP in various tasks such as molecule property prediction, zero-shot text-molecule retrieval, and 3D molecule captioning. Our code and collected dataset are available at https://github.com/xiaocui3737/GeomCLIP.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
