Patient-patient interactions visualization for drug side effects in patients’ reviews

Abstract

This paper describes the patient-patient interactions (PPIs) graph extraction framework from patient’s review transcripts. The concept is to visualise patients as nodes and interactions representing links. Links are made based on review text similarity. Nodes are categorized as positive or negative according to the patient’s attitude toward a given drug. Attitudes are then utilized to categorize the links as supporting or opposing the use of a certain drug. If both patients share the same attitude: negative (severe side effect) or positive (moderate side effect), the relationship is considered supportive; if not, the link is considered opposed. Resulting graph represent a drug as a dispute between two factions arguing on related drug. The framework is explained and evaluated using a dataset included 3,763 patients’ reviews linked to 255 different drugs, -predictive-value (0.37). We argue that, this is caused by derogatory jargon that is an expected feature of patient’s review. The true-negative-recognition-rate is 0.70 and true-positive-recognition-rate is 0.54. Total-average-accuracy, which is independent of class priors, is 0.66. Results show that, it is possible to use text proximity measures and sentiment analysis to capture PPIs structure.