Monday, November 10, 2014

Text Mining to Understand Patients

Text mining, where significant data or patterns is taken from large written texts, serves many purposes.  Recently, the medical profession has taken to text mining to better understand the most common symptoms and concerns.  In a recent study, researchers used text mining to analyze the personal stories and exchanges of fibromyalgia patients on a group website to identify the most frequently experienced symptoms as well as the most pressing medical concerns the group was interested in learning more about.

The study proved that text mining can successfully analyze personal stories to find common threads in the shared experiences of patient groups.  The resulting information enabled researchers to objectively understand the concerns of patients.

Source: Medical Science Monitor, October 7, 2014. By J. Park and Y.U. Ryu. College of Humanities, Ajou University, Suwon-si, Korea; Department of Physical Therapy, Catholic University of Daegu, Gyeongsan-si, Korea.

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