Providing care beyond the therapy session — a natural language processing–based recommender system that identifies cancer patients who experience psychosocial challenges and provides self-care support (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne W Leung ◽  
Bomi Park ◽  
Rachel Heo ◽  
Achini Adikari ◽  
Suja Chackochan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Supportive Care ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Recommender System ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Online Support Groups ◽  
Psychosocial Needs ◽  
Human Evaluation

BACKGROUND The negative psychosocial impacts of cancer diagnoses and treatments are well documented. Virtual care has become an essential mode of care delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic and online support groups (OSGs) are shown to improve accessibility to psychosocial and supportive care. The de Souza Institute offers CancerChatCanada, a therapist-led OSG service where sessions are monitored by an artificial intelligence-based co-facilitator (AICF). AICF is equipped with a recommender system that uses natural language processing to tailor online resources to patients according to their psychosocial needs. OBJECTIVE To outline the development protocol and to evaluate AICF on its precision and recall in recommending resources to cancer OSG members. METHODS Human input informed the design and evaluation on its ability to 1) appropriately identify key words indicating a psychosocial concern and 2) recommend the most appropriate online resource to the OSG member expressing each concern. Three rounds of human evaluation and algorithm improvement were performed iteratively. RESULTS We evaluated 7,190 outputs and achieved .797 precision, .981 recall, and an F1 score of .880 by the third round of evaluation. Resources were recommended to 48 patients and 25 (52.1%) accessed at least one resource. Of those who accessed the resources, 75.4% found them useful. CONCLUSIONS The preliminary findings suggest that AICF can help provide tailored support for cancer OSG members with high precision, recall, and satisfaction. AICF has undergone rigorous human evaluation and the results provide much-needed evidence, while outlining potential strengths and weaknesses for future applications in supportive care.

scholarly journals Natural Language Processing–Based Virtual Cofacilitator for Online Cancer Support Groups: Protocol for an Algorithm Development and Validation Study

10.2196/21453 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. e21453
Author(s):  
Yvonne W Leung ◽  
Elise Wouterloot ◽  
Achini Adikari ◽  
Graeme Hirst ◽  
Daswin de Silva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Online Support ◽  
Online Support Groups ◽  
Cancer Support

Background Cancer and its treatment can significantly impact the short- and long-term psychological well-being of patients and families. Emotional distress and depressive symptomatology are often associated with poor treatment adherence, reduced quality of life, and higher mortality. Cancer support groups, especially those led by health care professionals, provide a safe place for participants to discuss fear, normalize stress reactions, share solidarity, and learn about effective strategies to build resilience and enhance coping. However, in-person support groups may not always be accessible to individuals; geographic distance is one of the barriers for access, and compromised physical condition (eg, fatigue, pain) is another. Emerging evidence supports the effectiveness of online support groups in reducing access barriers. Text-based and professional-led online support groups have been offered by Cancer Chat Canada. Participants join the group discussion using text in real time. However, therapist leaders report some challenges leading text-based online support groups in the absence of visual cues, particularly in tracking participant distress. With multiple participants typing at the same time, the nuances of the text messages or red flags for distress can sometimes be missed. Recent advances in artificial intelligence such as deep learning–based natural language processing offer potential solutions. This technology can be used to analyze online support group text data to track participants’ expressed emotional distress, including fear, sadness, and hopelessness. Artificial intelligence allows session activities to be monitored in real time and alerts the therapist to participant disengagement. Objective We aim to develop and evaluate an artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator prototype to track and monitor online support group participants’ distress through real-time analysis of text-based messages posted during synchronous sessions. Methods An artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator will be developed to identify participants who are at-risk for increased emotional distress and track participant engagement and in-session group cohesion levels, providing real-time alerts for therapist to follow-up; generate postsession participant profiles that contain discussion content keywords and emotion profiles for each session; and automatically suggest tailored resources to participants according to their needs. The study is designed to be conducted in 4 phases consisting of (1) development based on a subset of data and an existing natural language processing framework, (2) performance evaluation using human scoring, (3) beta testing, and (4) user experience evaluation. Results This study received ethics approval in August 2019. Phase 1, development of an artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator, was completed in January 2020. As of December 2020, phase 2 is underway. The study is expected to be completed by September 2021. Conclusions An artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator offers a promising new mode of delivery of person-centered online support groups tailored to individual needs. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/21453

scholarly journals Natural Language Processing–Based Virtual Cofacilitator for Online Cancer Support Groups: Protocol for an Algorithm Development and Validation Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne W Leung ◽  
Elise Wouterloot ◽  
Achini Adikari ◽  
Graeme Hirst ◽  
Daswin de Silva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Online Support ◽  
Online Support Groups ◽  
Cancer Support

BACKGROUND Cancer and its treatment can significantly impact the short- and long-term psychological well-being of patients and families. Emotional distress and depressive symptomatology are often associated with poor treatment adherence, reduced quality of life, and higher mortality. Cancer support groups, especially those led by health care professionals, provide a safe place for participants to discuss fear, normalize stress reactions, share solidarity, and learn about effective strategies to build resilience and enhance coping. However, in-person support groups may not always be accessible to individuals; geographic distance is one of the barriers for access, and compromised physical condition (eg, fatigue, pain) is another. Emerging evidence supports the effectiveness of online support groups in reducing access barriers. Text-based and professional-led online support groups have been offered by Cancer Chat Canada. Participants join the group discussion using text in real time. However, therapist leaders report some challenges leading text-based online support groups in the absence of visual cues, particularly in tracking participant distress. With multiple participants typing at the same time, the nuances of the text messages or red flags for distress can sometimes be missed. Recent advances in artificial intelligence such as deep learning–based natural language processing offer potential solutions. This technology can be used to analyze online support group text data to track participants’ expressed emotional distress, including fear, sadness, and hopelessness. Artificial intelligence allows session activities to be monitored in real time and alerts the therapist to participant disengagement. OBJECTIVE We aim to develop and evaluate an artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator prototype to track and monitor online support group participants’ distress through real-time analysis of text-based messages posted during synchronous sessions. METHODS An artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator will be developed to identify participants who are at-risk for increased emotional distress and track participant engagement and in-session group cohesion levels, providing real-time alerts for therapist to follow-up; generate postsession participant profiles that contain discussion content keywords and emotion profiles for each session; and automatically suggest tailored resources to participants according to their needs. The study is designed to be conducted in 4 phases consisting of (1) development based on a subset of data and an existing natural language processing framework, (2) performance evaluation using human scoring, (3) beta testing, and (4) user experience evaluation. RESULTS This study received ethics approval in August 2019. Phase 1, development of an artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator, was completed in January 2020. As of December 2020, phase 2 is underway. The study is expected to be completed by September 2021. CONCLUSIONS An artificial intelligence–based cofacilitator offers a promising new mode of delivery of person-centered online support groups tailored to individual needs. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT DERR1-10.2196/21453

scholarly journals Natural language processing reveals vulnerable mental health support groups and heightened health anxiety on Reddit during COVID-19: an observational study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Mark Low ◽  
Laurie Rumker ◽  
Tanya Talkar ◽  
John Torous ◽  
Guillermo Cecchi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Health Anxiety ◽  
Mental Health Support ◽  
Health Support

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is exerting a devastating impact on mental health, but it is not clear how people with different types of mental health problems were differentially impacted as the initial wave of cases hit. Objective: We leverage natural language processing (NLP) with the goal of characterizing changes in fifteen of the world's largest mental health support groups (e.g., r/schizophrenia, r/SuicideWatch, r/Depression) found on the website Reddit, along with eleven non-mental health groups (e.g., r/PersonalFinance, r/conspiracy) during the initial stage of the pandemic. Methods: We create and release the Reddit Mental Health Dataset including posts from 826,961 unique users from 2018 to 2020. Using regression, we analyze trends from 90 text-derived features such as sentiment analysis, personal pronouns, and a “guns” semantic category. Using supervised machine learning, we classify posts into their respective support group and interpret important features to understand how different problems manifest in language. We apply unsupervised methods such as topic modeling and unsupervised clustering to uncover concerns throughout Reddit before and during the pandemic. Results: We find that the r/HealthAnxiety forum showed spikes in posts about COVID-19 early on in January, approximately two months before other support groups started posting about the pandemic. There were many features that significantly increased during COVID-19 for specific groups including the categories “economic stress”, “isolation”, and “home” while others such as “motion” significantly decreased. We find that support groups related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), eating disorders (ED), and anxiety showed the most negative semantic change during the pandemic out of all mental health groups. Health anxiety emerged as a general theme across Reddit through independent supervised and unsupervised machine learning analyses. For instance, we provide evidence that the concerns of a diverse set of individuals are converging in this unique moment of history; we discover that the more users posted about COVID-19, the more linguistically similar (less distant) the mental health support groups became to r/HealthAnxiety (ρ = -0.96, P<.001). Using unsupervised clustering, we find the Suicidality and Loneliness clusters more than doubled in amount of posts during the pandemic. Specifically, the support groups for borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder became significantly associated with the Suicidality cluster. Furthermore, clusters surrounding Self-Harm and Entertainment emerged. Conclusions: By using a broad set of NLP techniques and analyzing a baseline of pre-pandemic posts, we uncover patterns of how specific mental health problems manifest in language, identify at-risk users, and reveal the distribution of concerns across Reddit which could help provide better resources to its millions of users. We then demonstrate that textual analysis is sensitive to uncover mental health complaints as they arise in real time, identifying vulnerable groups and alarming themes during COVID-19, and thus may have utility during the ongoing pandemic and other world-changing events such as elections and protests from the present or the past.

Arabic Poem Generation Incorporating Deep Learning and Phonetic CNNsubword Embedding Models

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-91
Author(s):  
Sameerah Talafha ◽  
Banafsheh Rekabdar
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Generation Model ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Human Evaluation ◽  
Effective Contribution

Arabic poetry generation is a very challenging task since the linguistic structure of the Arabic language is considered a severe challenge for many researchers and developers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. In this paper, we propose a poetry generation model with extended phonetic and semantic embeddings (Phonetic CNNsubword embeddings). We show that Phonetic CNNsubword embeddings have an effective contribution to the overall model performance compared to FastTextsubword embeddings. Our poetry generation model consists of a two-stage approach: (1.) generating the first verse which explicitly incorporates the theme related phrase, (2.) other verses generation with the proposed Hierarchy-Attention Sequence-to-Sequence model (HAS2S), which adequately capture word, phrase, and verse information between contexts. A comprehensive human evaluation confirms that the poems generated by our model outperform the base models in criteria such as Meaning, Coherence, Fluency, and Poeticness. Extensive quantitative experiments using Bi-Lingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scores also demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines.

scholarly journals Natural Language Processing Reveals Vulnerable Mental Health Support Groups and Heightened Health Anxiety on Reddit During COVID-19: Observational Study

10.2196/22635 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. e22635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M Low ◽  
Laurie Rumker ◽  
Tanya Talkar ◽  
John Torous ◽  
Guillermo Cecchi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Support Groups ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Health Anxiety ◽  
Mental Health Support ◽  
Health Support

Background The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting mental health, but it is not clear how people with different types of mental health problems were differentially impacted as the initial wave of cases hit. Objective The aim of this study is to leverage natural language processing (NLP) with the goal of characterizing changes in 15 of the world’s largest mental health support groups (eg, r/schizophrenia, r/SuicideWatch, r/Depression) found on the website Reddit, along with 11 non–mental health groups (eg, r/PersonalFinance, r/conspiracy) during the initial stage of the pandemic. Methods We created and released the Reddit Mental Health Dataset including posts from 826,961 unique users from 2018 to 2020. Using regression, we analyzed trends from 90 text-derived features such as sentiment analysis, personal pronouns, and semantic categories. Using supervised machine learning, we classified posts into their respective support groups and interpreted important features to understand how different problems manifest in language. We applied unsupervised methods such as topic modeling and unsupervised clustering to uncover concerns throughout Reddit before and during the pandemic. Results We found that the r/HealthAnxiety forum showed spikes in posts about COVID-19 early on in January, approximately 2 months before other support groups started posting about the pandemic. There were many features that significantly increased during COVID-19 for specific groups including the categories “economic stress,” “isolation,” and “home,” while others such as “motion” significantly decreased. We found that support groups related to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders, and anxiety showed the most negative semantic change during the pandemic out of all mental health groups. Health anxiety emerged as a general theme across Reddit through independent supervised and unsupervised machine learning analyses. For instance, we provide evidence that the concerns of a diverse set of individuals are converging in this unique moment of history; we discovered that the more users posted about COVID-19, the more linguistically similar (less distant) the mental health support groups became to r/HealthAnxiety (ρ=–0.96, P<.001). Using unsupervised clustering, we found the suicidality and loneliness clusters more than doubled in the number of posts during the pandemic. Specifically, the support groups for borderline personality disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder became significantly associated with the suicidality cluster. Furthermore, clusters surrounding self-harm and entertainment emerged. Conclusions By using a broad set of NLP techniques and analyzing a baseline of prepandemic posts, we uncovered patterns of how specific mental health problems manifest in language, identified at-risk users, and revealed the distribution of concerns across Reddit, which could help provide better resources to its millions of users. We then demonstrated that textual analysis is sensitive to uncover mental health complaints as they appear in real time, identifying vulnerable groups and alarming themes during COVID-19, and thus may have utility during the ongoing pandemic and other world-changing events such as elections and protests.

scholarly journals Using Natural Language Processing Techniques to Provide Personalized Educational Materials for Chronic Disease Patients in China: Development and Assessment of a Knowledge-Based Health Recommender System (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zheyu Wang ◽  
Haoce Huang ◽  
Liping Cui ◽  
Juan Chen ◽  
Jiye An ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Chronic Disease ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Recommender System ◽  
Test Collection ◽  
Keyword Extraction ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Chronic Disease Patients

BACKGROUND Health education emerged as an important intervention for improving the awareness and self-management abilities of chronic disease patients. The development of information technologies has changed the form of patient educational materials from traditional paper materials to electronic materials. To date, the amount of patient educational materials on the internet is tremendous, with variable quality, which makes it hard to identify the most valuable materials by individuals lacking medical backgrounds. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a health recommender system to provide appropriate educational materials for chronic disease patients in China and evaluate the effect of this system. METHODS A knowledge-based recommender system was implemented using ontology and several natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The development process was divided into 3 stages. In stage 1, an ontology was constructed to describe patient characteristics contained in the data. In stage 2, an algorithm was designed and implemented to generate recommendations based on the ontology. Patient data and educational materials were mapped to the ontology and converted into vectors of the same length, and then recommendations were generated according to similarity between these vectors. In stage 3, the ontology and algorithm were incorporated into an mHealth system for practical use. Keyword extraction algorithms and pretrained word embeddings were used to preprocess educational materials. Three strategies were proposed to improve the performance of keyword extraction. System evaluation was based on a manually assembled test collection for 50 patients and 100 educational documents. Recommendation performance was assessed using the macro precision of top-ranked documents and the overall mean average precision (MAP). RESULTS The constructed ontology contained 40 classes, 31 object properties, 67 data properties, and 32 individuals. A total of 80 SWRL rules were defined to implement the semantic logic of mapping patient original data to the ontology vector space. The recommender system was implemented as a separate Web service connected with patients' smartphones. According to the evaluation results, our system can achieve a macro precision up to 0.970 for the top 1 recommendation and an overall MAP score up to 0.628. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated that a knowledge-based health recommender system has the potential to accurately recommend educational materials to chronic disease patients. Traditional NLP techniques combined with improvement strategies for specific language and domain proved to be effective for improving system performance. One direction for future work is to explore the effect of such systems from the perspective of patients in a practical setting.

scholarly journals An Innovative Recommender System for E-Commerce Websites using Natural Language Processing

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 4085-4089
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Recommender Systems ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Recommender System ◽  
Opinion Mining ◽  
The Internet

A Recommender System has become the go-to application for the internet generation these days. Mono-variate, bi-variate and multi-variate Recommender Systems are available to consumers of various products and services for the last 10 years or so only. In this paper, opinion mining dependent sentiment analysis using NLP tools will be used to recommend products to their purchasers on e-commerce websites. The application can be developed on the Python platform can be commercially used and will be precisely used to people who have to spend money without traditionally touching or feeling the item

Natural Language Processing Based Machine Learning Model Using Cardiac MRI Reports to Identify Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Patients

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Divaakar Siva Baala Sundaram ◽  
Shivaram P. Arunachalam ◽  
Devanshi N. Damani ◽  
Nasibeh Z. Farahani ◽  
Moein Enayati ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Adverse Outcomes ◽  
Accurate Identification ◽  
Automated Tools ◽  
Rich Data

Abstract Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common genetic heart disease in the US and is known to cause sudden death (SCD) in young adults. While significant advancements have been made in HCM diagnosis and management, there is a need to identify HCM cases from electronic health record (EHR) data to develop automated tools based on natural language processing guided machine learning (ML) models for accurate HCM case identification to improve management and reduce adverse outcomes of HCM patients. Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) Imaging, plays a significant role in HCM diagnosis and risk stratification. CMR reports, generated by clinician annotation, offer rich data in the form of cardiac measurements as well as narratives describing interpretation and phenotypic description. The purpose of this study is to develop an NLP-based interpretable model utilizing impressions extracted from CMR reports to automatically identify HCM patients. CMR reports of patients with suspected HCM diagnosis between the years 1995 to 2019 were used in this study. Patients were classified into three categories of yes HCM, no HCM and, possible HCM. A random forest (RF) model was developed to predict the performance of both CMR measurements and impression features to identify HCM patients. The RF model yielded an accuracy of 86% (608 features) and 85% (30 features). These results offer promise for accurate identification of HCM patients using CMR reports from EHR for efficient clinical management transforming health care delivery for these patients.

scholarly journals Using Natural Language Processing Techniques to Provide Personalized Educational Materials for Chronic Disease Patients in China: Development and Assessment of a Knowledge-Based Health Recommender System

10.2196/17642 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. e17642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zheyu Wang ◽  
Haoce Huang ◽  
Liping Cui ◽  
Juan Chen ◽  
Jiye An ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Chronic Disease ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Recommender System ◽  
Test Collection ◽  
Keyword Extraction ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Chronic Disease Patients

Background Health education emerged as an important intervention for improving the awareness and self-management abilities of chronic disease patients. The development of information technologies has changed the form of patient educational materials from traditional paper materials to electronic materials. To date, the amount of patient educational materials on the internet is tremendous, with variable quality, which makes it hard to identify the most valuable materials by individuals lacking medical backgrounds. Objective The aim of this study was to develop a health recommender system to provide appropriate educational materials for chronic disease patients in China and evaluate the effect of this system. Methods A knowledge-based recommender system was implemented using ontology and several natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The development process was divided into 3 stages. In stage 1, an ontology was constructed to describe patient characteristics contained in the data. In stage 2, an algorithm was designed and implemented to generate recommendations based on the ontology. Patient data and educational materials were mapped to the ontology and converted into vectors of the same length, and then recommendations were generated according to similarity between these vectors. In stage 3, the ontology and algorithm were incorporated into an mHealth system for practical use. Keyword extraction algorithms and pretrained word embeddings were used to preprocess educational materials. Three strategies were proposed to improve the performance of keyword extraction. System evaluation was based on a manually assembled test collection for 50 patients and 100 educational documents. Recommendation performance was assessed using the macro precision of top-ranked documents and the overall mean average precision (MAP). Results The constructed ontology contained 40 classes, 31 object properties, 67 data properties, and 32 individuals. A total of 80 SWRL rules were defined to implement the semantic logic of mapping patient original data to the ontology vector space. The recommender system was implemented as a separate Web service connected with patients' smartphones. According to the evaluation results, our system can achieve a macro precision up to 0.970 for the top 1 recommendation and an overall MAP score up to 0.628. Conclusions This study demonstrated that a knowledge-based health recommender system has the potential to accurately recommend educational materials to chronic disease patients. Traditional NLP techniques combined with improvement strategies for specific language and domain proved to be effective for improving system performance. One direction for future work is to explore the effect of such systems from the perspective of patients in a practical setting.

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