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Willeman T, Grunwald J, Manceau M, Lapierre F, Krebs-Drouot L, Boudin C, Scolan V, Eysseric-Guerin H, Stanke-Labesque F, Revol B. Smartphone swabs as an emerging tool for toxicology testing: a proof-of-concept study in a nightclub. Clin Chem Lab Med 2024; 62:1845-1852. [PMID: 38578968 DOI: 10.1515/cclm-2024-0242] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/22/2024] [Accepted: 03/27/2024] [Indexed: 04/07/2024]
Abstract
OBJECTIVES Smartphones have become everyday objects on which the accumulation of fingerprints is significant. In addition, a large proportion of the population regularly uses a smartphone, especially younger people. The objective of this study was to evaluate smartphones as a new matrix for toxico-epidemiology. METHODS This study was conducted during two separate events (techno and trance) at an electronic music nightclub in Grenoble, France. Data on reported drug use and whether drugs were snorted directly from the surface of the smartphone were collected using an anonymous questionnaire completed voluntarily by drug users. Then, a dry swab was rubbed for 20 s on all sides of the smartphone. The extract was analyzed by liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry on a Xevo TQ-XS system (Waters). RESULTS In total, 122 swabs from 122 drug users were collected. The three main drugs identified were MDMA (n=83), cocaine (n=59), and THC (n=51). Based on declarative data, sensitivity ranged from 73 to 97.2 % and specificity from 71.8 to 88.1 % for MDMA, cocaine, and THC. Other substances were identified such as cocaine adulterants, ketamine, amphetamine, LSD, methamphetamine, CBD, DMT, heroin, mescaline, and several NPS. Numerous medications were also identified, such as antidepressants, anxiolytics, hypnotics, and painkillers. Different use patterns were identified between the two events. CONCLUSIONS This proof-of-concept study on 122 subjects shows that smartphone swab analysis could provide a useful and complementary tool for drug testing, especially for harm-reduction programs and toxico-epidemiolgy studies, with acceptable test performance, despite declarative data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Théo Willeman
- 36724 Laboratoire de Pharmacologie, Pharmacogénétique et Toxicologie, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Institut de Biologie et de Pathologie, Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- 36724 Clinique de Médecine Légale, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
| | - Justine Grunwald
- 36724 Laboratoire de Pharmacologie, Pharmacogénétique et Toxicologie, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Institut de Biologie et de Pathologie, Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- 36724 CEIP-Addictovigilance, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
| | - Marc Manceau
- Clinical Research Center, Inserm CIC1406, Grenoble Alpes University Hospital, Grenoble, France
| | | | - Lila Krebs-Drouot
- 36724 Clinique de Médecine Légale, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
| | - Coralie Boudin
- Laboratoire de Médecine Légale, Univ Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
| | - Virginie Scolan
- 36724 Clinique de Médecine Légale, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- Laboratoire de Médecine Légale, Univ Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
| | - Hélène Eysseric-Guerin
- 36724 Laboratoire de Pharmacologie, Pharmacogénétique et Toxicologie, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Institut de Biologie et de Pathologie, Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- Laboratoire de Médecine Légale, Univ Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
| | - Françoise Stanke-Labesque
- 36724 Laboratoire de Pharmacologie, Pharmacogénétique et Toxicologie, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Institut de Biologie et de Pathologie, Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- Laboratoire HP2 Inserm U1300, Univ Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
| | - Bruno Revol
- 36724 CEIP-Addictovigilance, CHU Grenoble Alpes , 27015 Univ Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble, France
- Laboratoire HP2 Inserm U1300, Univ Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France
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Weng S, Wang C, Zhu R, Wu Y, Yang R, Zheng L, Li P, Zhao J, Zheng S. Identification of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy using hybrid transformer network. SPECTROCHIMICA ACTA. PART A, MOLECULAR AND BIOMOLECULAR SPECTROSCOPY 2024; 316:124295. [PMID: 38703407 DOI: 10.1016/j.saa.2024.124295] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/13/2023] [Revised: 04/04/2024] [Accepted: 04/13/2024] [Indexed: 05/06/2024]
Abstract
Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is extensively implemented in drug detection due to its sensitivity and non-destructive nature. Deep learning methods, which are represented by convolutional neural network (CNN), have been widely applied in identifying the spectra from SERS for powerful learning ability. However, the local receptive field of CNN limits the feature extraction of sequential spectra for suppressing the analysis results. In this study, a hybrid Transformer network, TMNet, was developed to identify SERS spectra by integrating the Transformer encoder and the multi-layer perceptron. The Transformer encoder can obtain precise feature representations of sequential spectra with the aid of self-attention, and the multi-layer perceptron efficiently transforms the representations to the final identification results. TMNet performed excellently, with identification accuracies of 99.07% for the spectra of hair containing drugs and 97.12% for those of urine containing drugs. For the spectra with additive white Gaussian, baseline background, and mixed noises, TMNet still exhibited the best performance among all the methods. Overall, the proposed method can accurately identify SERS spectra with outstanding noise resistance and excellent generalization and holds great potential for the analysis of other spectroscopy data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shizhuang Weng
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China.
| | - Cong Wang
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China
| | - Rui Zhu
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China
| | - Yehang Wu
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China
| | - Rui Yang
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China
| | - Ling Zheng
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China
| | - Pan Li
- Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China
| | - Jinling Zhao
- School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Anhui, Hefei 230601, China; National Engineering Research Center for Agro-Ecological Big Data Analysis & Application, Hefei 230601, China.
| | - Shouguo Zheng
- Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, China.
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Hauben M. A Pharmacovigilance Florilegium. Clin Ther 2024; 46:520-523. [PMID: 39030077 DOI: 10.1016/j.clinthera.2024.06.011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2024] [Accepted: 06/11/2024] [Indexed: 07/21/2024]
Affiliation(s)
- Manfred Hauben
- Department of Family and Community Medicine, New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York; Truliant Consulting, Baltimore, Maryland.
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Rogers JM, Colvin K, Epstein DH, Grundmann O, McCurdy CR, Smith KE. Growing pains with kratom: experiences discussed in subreddits contrast with satisfaction expressed in surveys. Front Pharmacol 2024; 15:1412397. [PMID: 38948457 PMCID: PMC11211595 DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2024.1412397] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/04/2024] [Accepted: 05/28/2024] [Indexed: 07/02/2024] Open
Abstract
Background "Kratom" refers to an array of bioactive products derived from Mitragyna speciosa, a tree indigenous to Southeast Asia. Most kratom consumers report analgesic and stimulatory effects, and common reasons for use are to address mental and physical health needs, manage pain, and to reduce use of other substances. Natural-history studies and survey studies suggest that many kratom consumers perceive benefits from those uses, but such studies are unlikely to capture the full range of kratom-use experiences. Methods We collected text data from Reddit posts from 2020-2022 to qualitatively examine conceptualizations, motivations, effects, and consequences associated with kratom use among people posting to social media. Reddit posts mentioning kratom were studied using template thematic analysis, which included collecting descriptions of kratom product types and use practices. Network analyses of coded themes was performed to examine independent relationships among themes, and between themes and product types. Results Codes were applied to 329 of the 370 posts that comprised the final sample; 134 posts contained kratom product descriptions. As Reddit accounts were functionally anonymous, demographic estimates were untenable. Themes included kratom physical dependence (tolerance, withdrawal, or use to avoid withdrawal), perceived addiction (net detrimental effects on functioning), and quitting. Extract products were positively associated with reports of perceived addiction, dependence, and experiences of quitting kratom. Many used kratom for energy and self-treatment of pain, fatigue, and problems associated with opioid and alcohol; they perceived these uses as effective. Consumers expressed frustrations about product inconsistencies and lack of product information. Conclusion As in previous studies, kratom was deemed helpful for some and a hindrance to others, but we also found evidence of notable negative experiences with kratom products that have not been well documented in surveys. Daily kratom use may produce mild-moderate physical dependence, with greater severity being possibly more common with concentrated extracts; however, there are currently no human laboratory studies of concentrated kratom extracts. Such studies, and detailed kratom product information, are needed to help inform consumer decision-making.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jeffrey M. Rogers
- San Diego State University/University of California San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, San Diego, CA, United States
| | - Kayla Colvin
- Real-world Assessment, Prediction, and Treatment Unit, National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, Baltimore, MD, United States
| | - David H. Epstein
- Real-world Assessment, Prediction, and Treatment Unit, National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, Baltimore, MD, United States
| | - Oliver Grundmann
- College of Pharmacy, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States
| | - Christopher R. McCurdy
- College of Pharmacy, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States
| | - Kirsten E. Smith
- Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States
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Eschliman EL, Choe K, DeLucia A, Addison E, Jackson VW, Murray SM, German D, Genberg BL, Kaufman MR. First-hand accounts of structural stigma toward people who use opioids on Reddit. Soc Sci Med 2024; 347:116772. [PMID: 38502980 PMCID: PMC11031276 DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116772] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/25/2024] [Revised: 03/06/2024] [Accepted: 03/08/2024] [Indexed: 03/21/2024]
Abstract
People who use opioids face multilevel stigma that negatively affects their health and well-being and drives opioid-related overdose. Little research has focused on lived experience of the structural levels of stigma toward opioid use. This study identified and qualitatively analyzed Reddit content about structural stigma toward opioid use. Iterative, human-in-the-loop natural language processing methods were used to identify relevant posts and comments from an opioid-related subforum. Ultimately, 273 posts and comments were qualitatively analyzed via directed content analysis guided by a prominent conceptualization of stigma. Redditors described how structures-including governmental programs and policies, the pharmaceutical industry, and healthcare systems-stigmatize people who use opioids. Structures were reported to stigmatize through labeling (i.e., particularly in medical settings), perpetuating negative stereotypes, separating people who use opioids into those who use opioids "legitimately" versus "illegitimately," and engendering status loss and discrimination (e.g., denial of healthcare, loss of employment). Redditors also posted robust formulations of structural stigma, mostly describing how it manifests in the criminalization of substance use, is often driven by profit motive, and leads to the pervasiveness of fentanyl in the drug supply and the current state of the overdose crisis. Some posts and comments highlighted interpersonal and structural resources (e.g., other people who use opioids, harm reduction programs, telemedicine) leveraged to navigate structural stigma and its effects. These findings reveal key ways by which structural stigma can pervade the lives of people who use opioids and show the value of social media data for investigating complex social processes. Particularly, this study's findings related to structural separation may help encourage efforts to promote solidarity among people who use opioids. Attending to first-hand accounts of structural stigma can help interventions aiming to reduce opioid-related stigma be more responsive to these stigmatizing structural forces and their felt effects.
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Affiliation(s)
- Evan L Eschliman
- Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, USA; Department of Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA.
| | - Karen Choe
- Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Global Public Health, New York University, USA
| | - Alexandra DeLucia
- Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, USA
| | | | - Valerie W Jackson
- Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care, University of California, San Francisco, USA
| | - Sarah M Murray
- Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
| | - Danielle German
- Department of Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
| | - Becky L Genberg
- Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
| | - Michelle R Kaufman
- Department of Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA; Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA
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Fuller A, Vasek M, Mariconti E, Johnson SD. Understanding and preventing the advertisement and sale of illicit drugs to young people through social media: A multidisciplinary scoping review. Drug Alcohol Rev 2024; 43:56-74. [PMID: 37523310 DOI: 10.1111/dar.13716] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/30/2022] [Revised: 06/12/2023] [Accepted: 06/20/2023] [Indexed: 08/02/2023]
Abstract
ISSUES The sale of illicit drugs online has expanded to mainstream social media apps. These platforms provide access to a wide audience, especially children and adolescents. Research is in its infancy and scattered due to the multidisciplinary aspects of the phenomena. APPROACH We present a multidisciplinary systematic scoping review on the advertisement and sale of illicit drugs to young people. Peer-reviewed studies written in English, Spanish and French were searched for the period 2015 to 2022. We extracted data on users, drugs studied, rate of posts, terminology used and study methodology. KEY FINDINGS A total of 56 peer-reviewed papers were included. The analysis of these highlights the variety of drugs advertised and platforms used to do so. Various methodological designs were considered. Approaches to detecting illicit content were the focus of many studies as algorithms move from detecting drug-related keywords to drug selling behaviour. We found that on average, for the studies reviewed, 13 in 100 social media posts advertise illicit drugs. However, popular platforms used by adolescents are rarely studied. IMPLICATIONS Promotional content is increasing in sophistication to appeal to young people, shifting towards healthy, glamourous and seemingly legal depictions of drugs. Greater inter-disciplinary collaboration between computational and qualitative approaches are needed to comprehensively study the sale and advertisement of illegal drugs on social media across different platforms. This requires coordinated action from researchers, policy makers and service providers.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ashly Fuller
- Dawes Centre for Future Crime, University College London, London, UK
- Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, UK
| | - Marie Vasek
- Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK
| | - Enrico Mariconti
- Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, UK
| | - Shane D Johnson
- Dawes Centre for Future Crime, University College London, London, UK
- Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, UK
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Keller R, Spanu A, Puhan MA, Flahault A, Lovis C, Mütsch M, Beau-Lejdstrom R. Social media and internet search data to inform drug utilization: A systematic scoping review. Front Digit Health 2023; 5:1074961. [PMID: 37021064 PMCID: PMC10067924 DOI: 10.3389/fdgth.2023.1074961] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/20/2022] [Accepted: 02/27/2023] [Indexed: 04/07/2023] Open
Abstract
Introduction Drug utilization is currently assessed through traditional data sources such as big electronic medical records (EMRs) databases, surveys, and medication sales. Social media and internet data have been reported to provide more accessible and more timely access to medications' utilization. Objective This review aims at providing evidence comparing web data on drug utilization to other sources before the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We searched Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Scopus until November 25th, 2019, using a predefined search strategy. Two independent reviewers conducted screening and data extraction. Results Of 6,563 (64%) deduplicated publications retrieved, 14 (0.2%) were included. All studies showed positive associations between drug utilization information from web and comparison data using very different methods. A total of nine (64%) studies found positive linear correlations in drug utilization between web and comparison data. Five studies reported association using other methods: One study reported similar drug popularity rankings using both data sources. Two studies developed prediction models for future drug consumption, including both web and comparison data, and two studies conducted ecological analyses but did not quantitatively compare data sources. According to the STROBE, RECORD, and RECORD-PE checklists, overall reporting quality was mediocre. Many items were left blank as they were out of scope for the type of study investigated. Conclusion Our results demonstrate the potential of web data for assessing drug utilization, although the field is still in a nascent period of investigation. Ultimately, social media and internet search data could be used to get a quick preliminary quantification of drug use in real time. Additional studies on the topic should use more standardized methodologies on different sets of drugs in order to confirm these findings. In addition, currently available checklists for study quality of reporting would need to be adapted to these new sources of scientific information.
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Affiliation(s)
- Roman Keller
- Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Future Health Technologies, Singapore-ETH Centre, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore, Singapore
- Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
- Correspondence: Roman Keller
| | - Alessandra Spanu
- Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Milo Alan Puhan
- Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Antoine Flahault
- Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Christian Lovis
- Division of Medical Information Sciences, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
- Department of Radiology and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
| | - Margot Mütsch
- Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
| | - Raphaelle Beau-Lejdstrom
- Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
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Khademi Habibabadi S, Hallinan C, Bonomo Y, Conway M. Consumer-Generated Discourse on Cannabis as a Medicine: Scoping Review of Techniques. J Med Internet Res 2022; 24:e35974. [PMID: 36383417 PMCID: PMC9713623 DOI: 10.2196/35974] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/24/2021] [Revised: 06/16/2022] [Accepted: 07/27/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Medicinal cannabis is increasingly being used for a variety of physical and mental health conditions. Social media and web-based health platforms provide valuable, real-time, and cost-effective surveillance resources for gleaning insights regarding individuals who use cannabis for medicinal purposes. This is particularly important considering that the evidence for the optimal use of medicinal cannabis is still emerging. Despite the web-based marketing of medicinal cannabis to consumers, currently, there is no robust regulatory framework to measure clinical health benefits or individual experiences of adverse events. In a previous study, we conducted a systematic scoping review of studies that contained themes of the medicinal use of cannabis and used data from social media and search engine results. This study analyzed the methodological approaches and limitations of these studies. OBJECTIVE We aimed to examine research approaches and study methodologies that use web-based user-generated text to study the use of cannabis as a medicine. METHODS We searched MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase databases for primary studies in the English language from January 1974 to April 2022. Studies were included if they aimed to understand web-based user-generated text related to health conditions where cannabis is used as a medicine or where health was mentioned in general cannabis-related conversations. RESULTS We included 42 articles in this review. In these articles, Twitter was used 3 times more than other computer-generated sources, including Reddit, web-based forums, GoFundMe, YouTube, and Google Trends. Analytical methods included sentiment assessment, thematic analysis (manual and automatic), social network analysis, and geographic analysis. CONCLUSIONS This study is the first to review techniques used by research on consumer-generated text for understanding cannabis as a medicine. It is increasingly evident that consumer-generated data offer opportunities for a greater understanding of individual behavior and population health outcomes. However, research using these data has some limitations that include difficulties in establishing sample representativeness and a lack of methodological best practices. To address these limitations, deidentified annotated data sources should be made publicly available, researchers should determine the origins of posts (organizations, bots, power users, or ordinary individuals), and powerful analytical techniques should be used.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sedigheh Khademi Habibabadi
- Department of General Practice, Melbourne Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
| | - Christine Hallinan
- Department of General Practice, Melbourne Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
- Health & Biomedical Research Information Technology Unit, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
| | - Yvonne Bonomo
- Department of General Practice, Melbourne Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
| | - Mike Conway
- School of Computing & Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
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Walsh J, Dwumfour C, Cave J, Griffiths F. Spontaneously generated online patient experience data - how and why is it being used in health research: an umbrella scoping review. BMC Med Res Methodol 2022; 22:139. [PMID: 35562661 PMCID: PMC9106384 DOI: 10.1186/s12874-022-01610-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/01/2021] [Accepted: 04/13/2022] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
PURPOSE Social media has led to fundamental changes in the way that people look for and share health related information. There is increasing interest in using this spontaneously generated patient experience data as a data source for health research. The aim was to summarise the state of the art regarding how and why SGOPE data has been used in health research. We determined the sites and platforms used as data sources, the purposes of the studies, the tools and methods being used, and any identified research gaps. METHODS A scoping umbrella review was conducted looking at review papers from 2015 to Jan 2021 that studied the use of SGOPE data for health research. Using keyword searches we identified 1759 papers from which we included 58 relevant studies in our review. RESULTS Data was used from many individual general or health specific platforms, although Twitter was the most widely used data source. The most frequent purposes were surveillance based, tracking infectious disease, adverse event identification and mental health triaging. Despite the developments in machine learning the reviews included lots of small qualitative studies. Most NLP used supervised methods for sentiment analysis and classification. Very early days, methods need development. Methods not being explained. Disciplinary differences - accuracy tweaks vs application. There is little evidence of any work that either compares the results in both methods on the same data set or brings the ideas together. CONCLUSION Tools, methods, and techniques are still at an early stage of development, but strong consensus exists that this data source will become very important to patient centred health research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Julia Walsh
- Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
| | | | - Jonathan Cave
- Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
| | - Frances Griffiths
- Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.,Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
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Multi-layer data integration technique for combining heterogeneous crime data. Inf Process Manag 2022. [DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2022.102879] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
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Al-Garadi MA, Yang YC, Guo Y, Kim S, Love JS, Perrone J, Sarker A. Large-Scale Social Media Analysis Reveals Emotions Associated with Nonmedical Prescription Drug Use. HEALTH DATA SCIENCE 2022; 2022:9851989. [PMID: 37621877 PMCID: PMC10449547 DOI: 10.34133/2022/9851989] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 08/26/2023]
Abstract
Background The behaviors and emotions associated with and reasons for nonmedical prescription drug use (NMPDU) are not well-captured through traditional instruments such as surveys and insurance claims. Publicly available NMPDU-related posts on social media can potentially be leveraged to study these aspects unobtrusively and at scale. Methods We applied a machine learning classifier to detect self-reports of NMPDU on Twitter and extracted all public posts of the associated users. We analyzed approximately 137 million posts from 87,718 Twitter users in terms of expressed emotions, sentiments, concerns, and possible reasons for NMPDU via natural language processing. Results Users in the NMPDU group express more negative emotions and less positive emotions, more concerns about family, the past, and body, and less concerns related to work, leisure, home, money, religion, health, and achievement compared to a control group (i.e., users who never reported NMPDU). NMPDU posts tend to be highly polarized, indicating potential emotional triggers. Gender-specific analyses show that female users in the NMPDU group express more content related to positive emotions, anticipation, sadness, joy, concerns about family, friends, home, health, and the past, and less about anger than males. The findings are consistent across distinct prescription drug categories (opioids, benzodiazepines, stimulants, and polysubstance). Conclusion Our analyses of large-scale data show that substantial differences exist between the texts of the posts from users who self-report NMPDU on Twitter and those who do not, and between males and females who report NMPDU. Our findings can enrich our understanding of NMPDU and the population involved.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
| | - Yuan-Chi Yang
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
| | - Yuting Guo
- Department of Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
| | - Sangmi Kim
- School of Nursing, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
| | - Jennifer S. Love
- Department of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA
| | - Jeanmarie Perrone
- Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
| | - Abeed Sarker
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
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Magge A, Weissenbacher D, O'Connor K, Scotch M, Gonzalez-Hernandez G. SEED: Symptom Extraction from English Social Media Posts using Deep Learning and Transfer Learning. MEDRXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR HEALTH SCIENCES 2022:2021.02.09.21251454. [PMID: 33594374 PMCID: PMC7885933 DOI: 10.1101/2021.02.09.21251454] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/02/2022]
Abstract
The increase of social media usage across the globe has fueled efforts in digital epidemiology for mining valuable information such as medication use, adverse drug effects and reports of viral infections that directly and indirectly affect population health. Such specific information can, however, be scarce, hard to find, and mostly expressed in very colloquial language. In this work, we focus on a fundamental problem that enables social media mining for disease monitoring. We present and make available SEED, a natural language processing approach to detect symptom and disease mentions from social media data obtained from platforms such as Twitter and DailyStrength and to normalize them into UMLS terminology. Using multi-corpus training and deep learning models, the tool achieves an overall F1 score of 0.86 and 0.72 on DailyStrength and balanced Twitter datasets, significantly improving over previous approaches on the same datasets. We apply the tool on Twitter posts that report COVID19 symptoms, particularly to quantify whether the SEED system can extract symptoms absent in the training data. The study results also draw attention to the potential of multi-corpus training for performance improvements and the need for continuous training on newly obtained data for consistent performance amidst the ever-changing nature of the social media vocabulary.
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Affiliation(s)
- Arjun Magge
- Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
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13
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ElSherief M, Sumner SA, Jones CM, Law RK, Kacha-Ochana A, Shieber L, Cordier L, Holton K, De Choudhury M. Characterizing and Identifying the Prevalence of Web-Based Misinformation Relating to Medication for Opioid Use Disorder: Machine Learning Approach. J Med Internet Res 2021; 23:e30753. [PMID: 34941555 PMCID: PMC8734931 DOI: 10.2196/30753] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/27/2021] [Revised: 10/04/2021] [Accepted: 10/19/2021] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Background Expanding access to and use of medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) is a key component of overdose prevention. An important barrier to the uptake of MOUD is exposure to inaccurate and potentially harmful health misinformation on social media or web-based forums where individuals commonly seek information. There is a significant need to devise computational techniques to describe the prevalence of web-based health misinformation related to MOUD to facilitate mitigation efforts. Objective By adopting a multidisciplinary, mixed methods strategy, this paper aims to present machine learning and natural language analysis approaches to identify the characteristics and prevalence of web-based misinformation related to MOUD to inform future prevention, treatment, and response efforts. Methods The team harnessed public social media posts and comments in the English language from Twitter (6,365,245 posts), YouTube (99,386 posts), Reddit (13,483,419 posts), and Drugs-Forum (5549 posts). Leveraging public health expert annotations on a sample of 2400 of these social media posts that were found to be semantically most similar to a variety of prevailing opioid use disorder–related myths based on representational learning, the team developed a supervised machine learning classifier. This classifier identified whether a post’s language promoted one of the leading myths challenging addiction treatment: that the use of agonist therapy for MOUD is simply replacing one drug with another. Platform-level prevalence was calculated thereafter by machine labeling all unannotated posts with the classifier and noting the proportion of myth-indicative posts over all posts. Results Our results demonstrate promise in identifying social media postings that center on treatment myths about opioid use disorder with an accuracy of 91% and an area under the curve of 0.9, including how these discussions vary across platforms in terms of prevalence and linguistic characteristics, with the lowest prevalence on web-based health communities such as Reddit and Drugs-Forum and the highest on Twitter. Specifically, the prevalence of the stated MOUD myth ranged from 0.4% on web-based health communities to 0.9% on Twitter. Conclusions This work provides one of the first large-scale assessments of a key MOUD-related myth across multiple social media platforms and highlights the feasibility and importance of ongoing assessment of health misinformation related to addiction treatment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mai ElSherief
- University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States
| | - Steven A Sumner
- Office of Strategy and Innovation, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States
| | - Christopher M Jones
- National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States
| | - Royal K Law
- Division of Injury Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States
| | - Akadia Kacha-Ochana
- Office of Strategy and Innovation, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States
| | | | | | - Kelly Holton
- National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States
| | - Munmun De Choudhury
- School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States
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14
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Hu C, Yin M, Liu B, Li X, Ye Y. Identifying Illicit Drug Dealers on Instagram with Large-scale Multimodal Data Fusion. ACM T INTEL SYST TEC 2021. [DOI: 10.1145/3472713] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
Abstract
Illicit drug trafficking via social media sites such as Instagram have become a severe problem, thus drawing a great deal of attention from law enforcement and public health agencies. How to identify illicit drug dealers from social media data has remained a technical challenge for the following reasons. On the one hand, the available data are limited because of privacy concerns with crawling social media sites; on the other hand, the diversity of drug dealing patterns makes it difficult to reliably distinguish drug dealers from common drug users. Unlike existing methods that focus on posting-based detection, we propose to tackle the problem of
illicit drug dealer identification
by constructing a large-scale multimodal dataset named
Identifying Drug Dealers on Instagram
(IDDIG). Nearly 4,000 user accounts, of which more than 1,400 are drug dealers, have been collected from Instagram with multiple data sources including post comments, post images, homepage bio, and homepage images. We then design a quadruple-based multimodal fusion method to combine the multiple data sources associated with each user account for drug dealer identification. Experimental results on the constructed IDDIG dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in identifying drug dealers (almost 95% accuracy). Moreover, we have developed a hashtag-based community detection technique for discovering evolving patterns, especially those related to geography and drug types.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chuanbo Hu
- West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV
| | | | - Bin Liu
- West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV
| | - Xin Li
- West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV
| | - Yanfang Ye
- Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
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15
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Koss J, Rheinlaender A, Truebel H, Bohnet-Joschko S. Social media mining in drug development-Fundamentals and use cases. Drug Discov Today 2021; 26:2871-2880. [PMID: 34481080 DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2021.08.012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/15/2021] [Revised: 06/03/2021] [Accepted: 08/27/2021] [Indexed: 11/18/2022]
Abstract
The incorporation of patients' perspectives into drug discovery and development has become critically important from the viewpoint of accounting for modern-day business dynamics. There is a trend among patients to narrate their disease experiences on social media. The insights gained by analyzing the data pertaining to such social-media posts could be leveraged to support patient-centered drug development. Manual analysis of these data is nearly impossible, but artificial intelligence enables automated and cost-effective processing, also referred as social media mining (SMM). This paper discusses the fundamental SMM methods along with several relevant drug-development use cases.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | - Hubert Truebel
- Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany; AiCuris AG, Wuppertal, Germany
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16
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Arillotta D, Guirguis A, Corkery JM, Scherbaum N, Schifano F. COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Substance Misuse: A Social Media Listening, Mixed Method Analysis. Brain Sci 2021; 11:brainsci11070907. [PMID: 34356142 PMCID: PMC8303488 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci11070907] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2021] [Revised: 07/02/2021] [Accepted: 07/05/2021] [Indexed: 12/23/2022] Open
Abstract
The restrictive measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic modified some previously consolidated drug use patterns. A focus on social networks allowed drug users to discuss, share opinions and provide advice during a worldwide emergency context. In order to explore COVID-19-related implications on drug trends/behaviour and on most popular psychotropic substances debated, the focus here was on the constantly updated, very popular, Reddit social platform’s posts and comments. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of r/Drugs and related subreddits, using a social media listening netnographic approach, was carried out. The post/comments analysed covered the time-frame December 2019–May 2020. Between December 2019 and May 2020, the number of whole r/Drugs subreddit members increased from 619,563 to 676,581 members, respectively, thus increasing by 9.2% by the end of the data collection. Both the top-level r/Drugs subreddit and 92 related subreddits were quantitatively analysed, with posts/comments related to 12 drug categories. The drugs most frequently commented on included cannabinoids, psychedelics, opiates/opioids, alcohol, stimulants and prescribed medications. The qualitative analysis was carried out focussing on four subreddits, relating to some 1685 posts and 3263 comments. Four main themes of discussion (e.g., lockdown-associated immunity and drug intake issues; drug-related behaviour/after-quarantine plans’ issues; lockdown-related psychopathological issues; and peer-to-peer advice at the time of COVID-19) and four categories of Redditors (e.g., those continuing the use of drugs despite the pandemic; the “couch epidemiologists”; the conspirationists/pseudo-science influencers; and the recovery-focused users) were tentatively identified here. A mixed-methods, social network-based analysis provided a range of valuable information on Redditors’ drug use/behaviour during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further studies should be carried out focusing on other social networks as well as later phases of the pandemic.
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Affiliation(s)
- Davide Arillotta
- Psychopharmacology, Drug Misuse, and Novel Psychoactive Substances Research Unit, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK; (D.A.); (A.G.); (J.M.C.); (F.S.)
| | - Amira Guirguis
- Psychopharmacology, Drug Misuse, and Novel Psychoactive Substances Research Unit, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK; (D.A.); (A.G.); (J.M.C.); (F.S.)
- Swansea University Medical School, Institute of Life Sciences 2, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
| | - John Martin Corkery
- Psychopharmacology, Drug Misuse, and Novel Psychoactive Substances Research Unit, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK; (D.A.); (A.G.); (J.M.C.); (F.S.)
| | - Norbert Scherbaum
- Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical Faculty, LVR-Hospital Essen, University of Duisburg-Essen, Virchowstraße 174, 45147 Essen, Germany
- Correspondence:
| | - Fabrizio Schifano
- Psychopharmacology, Drug Misuse, and Novel Psychoactive Substances Research Unit, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK; (D.A.); (A.G.); (J.M.C.); (F.S.)
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17
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Yang YC, Al-Garadi MA, Love JS, Perrone J, Sarker A. Automatic gender detection in Twitter profiles for health-related cohort studies. JAMIA Open 2021; 4:ooab042. [PMID: 34169232 PMCID: PMC8220305 DOI: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab042] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/21/2021] [Revised: 04/27/2021] [Accepted: 05/04/2021] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Objective Biomedical research involving social media data is gradually moving from population-level to targeted, cohort-level data analysis. Though crucial for biomedical studies, social media user’s demographic information (eg, gender) is often not explicitly known from profiles. Here, we present an automatic gender classification system for social media and we illustrate how gender information can be incorporated into a social media-based health-related study. Materials and Methods We used a large Twitter dataset composed of public, gender-labeled users (Dataset-1) for training and evaluating the gender detection pipeline. We experimented with machine learning algorithms including support vector machines (SVMs) and deep-learning models, and public packages including M3. We considered users’ information including profile and tweets for classification. We also developed a meta-classifier ensemble that strategically uses the predicted scores from the classifiers. We then applied the best-performing pipeline to Twitter users who have self-reported nonmedical use of prescription medications (Dataset-2) to assess the system’s utility. Results and Discussion We collected 67 181 and 176 683 users for Dataset-1 and Dataset-2, respectively. A meta-classifier involving SVM and M3 performed the best (Dataset-1 accuracy: 94.4% [95% confidence interval: 94.0–94.8%]; Dataset-2: 94.4% [95% confidence interval: 92.0–96.6%]). Including automatically classified information in the analyses of Dataset-2 revealed gender-specific trends—proportions of females closely resemble data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health 2018 (tranquilizers: 0.50 vs 0.50; stimulants: 0.50 vs 0.45), and the overdose Emergency Room Visit due to Opioids by Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (pain relievers: 0.38 vs 0.37). Conclusion Our publicly available, automated gender detection pipeline may aid cohort-specific social media data analyses (https://bitbucket.org/sarkerlab/gender-detection-for-public).
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuan-Chi Yang
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
| | - Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
| | - Jennifer S Love
- Department of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA
| | - Jeanmarie Perrone
- Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
| | - Abeed Sarker
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.,Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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18
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Al-Garadi MA, Yang YC, Cai H, Ruan Y, O'Connor K, Graciela GH, Perrone J, Sarker A. Text classification models for the automatic detection of nonmedical prescription medication use from social media. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2021; 21:27. [PMID: 33499852 PMCID: PMC7835447 DOI: 10.1186/s12911-021-01394-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/11/2020] [Accepted: 01/12/2021] [Indexed: 01/27/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Prescription medication (PM) misuse/abuse has emerged as a national crisis in the United States, and social media has been suggested as a potential resource for performing active monitoring. However, automating a social media-based monitoring system is challenging-requiring advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning methods. In this paper, we describe the development and evaluation of automatic text classification models for detecting self-reports of PM abuse from Twitter. METHODS We experimented with state-of-the-art bi-directional transformer-based language models, which utilize tweet-level representations that enable transfer learning (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, AlBERT, and DistilBERT), proposed fusion-based approaches, and compared the developed models with several traditional machine learning, including deep learning, approaches. Using a public dataset, we evaluated the performances of the classifiers on their abilities to classify the non-majority "abuse/misuse" class. RESULTS Our proposed fusion-based model performs significantly better than the best traditional model (F1-score [95% CI]: 0.67 [0.64-0.69] vs. 0.45 [0.42-0.48]). We illustrate, via experimentation using varying training set sizes, that the transformer-based models are more stable and require less annotated data compared to the other models. The significant improvements achieved by our best-performing classification model over past approaches makes it suitable for automated continuous monitoring of nonmedical PM use from Twitter. CONCLUSIONS BERT, BERT-like and fusion-based models outperform traditional machine learning and deep learning models, achieving substantial improvements over many years of past research on the topic of prescription medication misuse/abuse classification from social media, which had been shown to be a complex task due to the unique ways in which information about nonmedical use is presented. Several challenges associated with the lack of context and the nature of social media language need to be overcome to further improve BERT and BERT-like models. These experimental driven challenges are represented as potential future research directions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, 101 Woodruff Circle, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA.
| | - Yuan-Chi Yang
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, 101 Woodruff Circle, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA
| | - Haitao Cai
- Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
| | - Yucheng Ruan
- School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
| | - Karen O'Connor
- Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
| | - Gonzalez-Hernandez Graciela
- Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
| | - Jeanmarie Perrone
- Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
| | - Abeed Sarker
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, 101 Woodruff Circle, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA
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19
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Gupta M, Bansal A, Jain B, Rochelle J, Oak A, Jalali MS. Whether the weather will help us weather the COVID-19 pandemic: Using machine learning to measure twitter users' perceptions. Int J Med Inform 2021; 145:104340. [PMID: 33242762 PMCID: PMC7654388 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2020.104340] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/24/2020] [Revised: 11/03/2020] [Accepted: 11/09/2020] [Indexed: 12/19/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVE The potential ability for weather to affect SARS-CoV-2 transmission has been an area of controversial discussion during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals' perceptions of the impact of weather can inform their adherence to public health guidelines; however, there is no measure of their perceptions. We quantified Twitter users' perceptions of the effect of weather and analyzed how they evolved with respect to real-world events and time. MATERIALS AND METHODS We collected 166,005 English tweets posted between January 23 and June 22, 2020 and employed machine learning/natural language processing techniques to filter for relevant tweets, classify them by the type of effect they claimed, and identify topics of discussion. RESULTS We identified 28,555 relevant tweets and estimate that 40.4 % indicate uncertainty about weather's impact, 33.5 % indicate no effect, and 26.1 % indicate some effect. We tracked changes in these proportions over time. Topic modeling revealed major latent areas of discussion. DISCUSSION There is no consensus among the public for weather's potential impact. Earlier months were characterized by tweets that were uncertain of weather's effect or claimed no effect; later, the portion of tweets claiming some effect of weather increased. Tweets claiming no effect of weather comprised the largest class by June. Major topics of discussion included comparisons to influenza's seasonality, President Trump's comments on weather's effect, and social distancing. CONCLUSION We exhibit a research approach that is effective in measuring population perceptions and identifying misconceptions, which can inform public health communications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marichi Gupta
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
| | - Aditya Bansal
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India
| | - Bhav Jain
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
| | - Jillian Rochelle
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
| | - Atharv Oak
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
| | - Mohammad S Jalali
- MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
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20
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Fodeh SJ, Al-Garadi M, Elsankary O, Perrone J, Becker W, Sarker A. Utilizing a multi-class classification approach to detect therapeutic and recreational misuse of opioids on Twitter. Comput Biol Med 2020; 129:104132. [PMID: 33290931 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.104132] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/20/2020] [Revised: 11/10/2020] [Accepted: 11/16/2020] [Indexed: 10/23/2022]
Abstract
BACKGROUND Opioid misuse (OM) is a major health problem in the United States, and can lead to addiction and fatal overdose. We sought to employ natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to categorize Twitter chatter based on the motive of OM. MATERIALS AND METHODS We collected data from Twitter using opioid-related keywords, and manually annotated 6988 tweets into three classes-No-OM, Pain-related-OM, and Recreational-OM-with the No-OM class representing tweets indicating no use/misuse, and the Pain-related misuse and Recreational-misuse classes representing misuse for pain or recreation/addiction. We trained and evaluated multi-class classifiers, and performed term-level k-means clustering to assess whether there were terms closely associated with the three classes. RESULTS On a held-out test set of 1677 tweets, a transformer-based classifier (XLNet) achieved the best performance with F1-score of 0.71 for the Pain-misuse class, and 0.79 for the Recreational-misuse class. Macro- and micro-averaged F1-scores over all classes were 0.82 and 0.92, respectively. Content-analysis using clustering revealed distinct clusters of terms associated with each class. DISCUSSION While some past studies have attempted to automatically detect opioid misuse, none have further characterized the motive for misuse. Our multi-class classification approach using XLNet showed promising performance, including in detecting the subtle differences between pain-related and recreation-related misuse. The distinct clustering of class-specific keywords may help conduct targeted data collection, overcoming under-representation of minority classes. CONCLUSION Machine learning can help identify pain-related and recreational-related OM contents on Twitter to potentially enable the study of the characteristics of individuals exhibiting such behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Samah Jamal Fodeh
- Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510, USA; VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven, CT 06516, USA.
| | - Mohammed Al-Garadi
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
| | - Osama Elsankary
- Frank Netter M.D. School of Medicine, Quinnipiac University, North Haven, CT 06473, USA
| | - Jeanmarie Perrone
- Department of Emergency Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
| | - William Becker
- VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven, CT 06516, USA
| | - Abeed Sarker
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
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21
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Use of Social Media for Pharmacovigilance Activities: Key Findings and Recommendations from the Vigi4Med Project. Drug Saf 2020; 43:835-851. [PMID: 32557179 DOI: 10.1007/s40264-020-00951-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
The large-scale use of social media by the population has gained the attention of stakeholders and researchers in various fields. In the domain of pharmacovigilance, this new resource was initially considered as an opportunity to overcome underreporting and monitor the safety of drugs in real time in close connection with patients. Research is still required to overcome technical challenges related to data extraction, annotation, and filtering, and there is not yet a clear consensus concerning the systematic exploration and use of social media in pharmacovigilance. Although the literature has mainly considered signal detection, the potential value of social media to support other pharmacovigilance activities should also be explored. The objective of this paper is to present the main findings and subsequent recommendations from the French research project Vigi4Med, which evaluated the use of social media, mainly web forums, for pharmacovigilance activities. This project included an analysis of the existing literature, which contributed to the recommendations presented herein. The recommendations are categorized into three categories: ethical (related to privacy, confidentiality, and follow-up), qualitative (related to the quality of the information), and quantitative (related to statistical analysis). We argue that the progress in information technology and the societal need to consider patients' experiences should motivate future research on social media surveillance for the reinforcement of classical pharmacovigilance.
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22
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Tekumalla R, Banda JM. Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT). Genomics Inform 2020; 18:e16. [PMID: 32634870 PMCID: PMC7362951 DOI: 10.5808/gi.2020.18.2.e16] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/16/2020] [Accepted: 05/22/2020] [Indexed: 12/16/2022] Open
Abstract
There has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of utilizing social media data for research purposes within the biomedical community. In PubMed alone, there have been nearly 2,500 publication entries since 2014 that deal with analyzing social media data from Twitter and Reddit. However, the vast majority of those works do not share their code or data for replicating their studies. With minimal exceptions, the few that do, place the burden on the researcher to figure out how to fetch the data, how to best format their data, and how to create automatic and manual annotations on the acquired data. In order to address this pressing issue, we introduce the Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT), a suite of tools aimed to encapsulate the cumbersome details of acquiring, preprocessing, annotating and standardizing social media data. The purpose of our toolkit is for researchers to focus on answering research questions, and not the technical aspects of using social media data. By using a standard toolkit, researchers will be able to acquire, use, and release data in a consistent way that is transparent for everybody using the toolkit, hence, simplifying research reproducibility and accessibility in the social media domain.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Juan M Banda
- Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA
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23
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Automatic Breast Cancer Cohort Detection from Social Media for Studying Factors Affecting Patient-Centered Outcomes. Artif Intell Med 2020. [DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-59137-3_10] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
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