Utilizing Social Media Data for Pharmacovigilance: A Review

By Abeed Sarker, Rachel E. Ginn, Azadeh Nikfarjam, Karen O'Connor, Karen L. Smith, S. Jayaraman, Tejaswi Upadhaya, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2015

501 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective Automatic monitoring of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), defined as adverse patient outcomes caused by medications, is a challenging research problem that is currently receiving significant attention from the medical informatics community. In recent years, user-posted data on social media, primarily due to its sheer volume, has become a useful resource for ADR monitoring. Research using social media data has progressed using various data sources and techniques, making it difficult to compare distinct systems and their performances. In this paper, we perform a methodical review to characterize the different approaches to ADR detection/extraction from social media, and their applicability to pharmacovigilance. In addition, we present a potential systematic pathway to ADR monitoring from social media. Methods We identified studies, describing approaches for ADR detection from social media from the Medline, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science databases, and the Google Scholar search engine. Studies that met our inclusion criteria were those that attempted to utilize ADR information posted by users on any publicly available social media platform. We categorized the studies into various dimensions such as primary ADR detection approach, size of data, source(s), availability, evaluation criteria, and so on. Results Twenty-two studies met our inclusion criteria, with fifteen (68.2%) published within the last two years. The survey revealed a clear trend towards the usage of annotated data with eleven of the fifteen (73.3%) studies published in the last two years relying on expert annotations. However, publicly available annotated data is still scarce, and we found only six (27.3%) studies that made the annotations used publicly available, making system performance comparisons difficult. In terms of algorithms, supervised classification techniques to detect posts containing ADR mentions, and lexicon-based approaches for extraction of ADR mentions from texts have been the most popular. Conclusion Our review suggests that interest in the utilization of the vast amounts of available social media data for ADR monitoring is increasing with time. In terms of sources, both health-related and general social media data have been used for ADR detection— while health-related sources tend to contain higher proportions of relevant data, the volume of data from general social media websites is significantly higher. There is still very limited publicly available annotated data available, and, as indicated by the promising results obtained by recent supervised learning approaches, there is a strong need to make such data available to the research community.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Sociology and Political Science, Toxicology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3738e35f7b288f8689c41bbe9d5a6a6b0c430831

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In Molecular Biology

  1. Yuan Luo
  2. Ozlem Uzuner
  3. Peter Szolovits
  4. Zexian Zeng
  5. Tristan Naumann

In Sociology and Political Science

  1. M. de Choudhury
  2. Emre Kıcıman

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