MINING THE WEB FOR MEDICAL HYPOTHESES - A Proof-of-Concept System

Diana MacLean, Margo Seltzer

2011

Abstract

As the prevalence of blogs, discussion forums, and online news services continues to grow, so too does the portion of this Web content that relates to health and medicine. We propose that everyday, medically-oriented Web content is a valuable and viable data source for medical hypothesis generation and testing, despite its being noisy. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept system supporting this notion. We construct a corpus comprising news articles relating to the drugs Vioxx, Naproxen and Ibuprofen, that were published between 1998-2002. Using this corpus, we show that there was a significant link between Vioxx and the concept “Myocardial Infarction” well before the drug was withdrawn from the market in 2004. Indeed, within the Vioxx-related content, the concept ranks amongst the top 3.3% in terms of importance. When compared with the Naproxen and Ibuprofen control literatures, the term occurs significantly more frequently in the Vioxx-related content.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

MacLean D. and Seltzer M. (2011). MINING THE WEB FOR MEDICAL HYPOTHESES - A Proof-of-Concept System . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011) ISBN 978-989-8425-34-8, pages 303-308. DOI: 10.5220/0003166403030308

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf11,
author={Diana MacLean and Margo Seltzer},
title={MINING THE WEB FOR MEDICAL HYPOTHESES - A Proof-of-Concept System},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011)},
year={2011},
pages={303-308},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003166403030308},
isbn={978-989-8425-34-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2011)
TI - MINING THE WEB FOR MEDICAL HYPOTHESES - A Proof-of-Concept System
SN - 978-989-8425-34-8
AU - MacLean D.
AU - Seltzer M.
PY - 2011
SP - 303
EP - 308
DO - 10.5220/0003166403030308