Sarker Lab Emory University

Research

Mining Social Media Big Data for Toxicovigilance: Studying Substance Use via NLP and Machine Learning Methods
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According to the World Health Organization, toxicovigilance is the active process of identifying and evaluating the toxic risks existing in a community, and evaluating the measures taken to reduce or eliminate them. Our toxicovigilance research focuses on prescription and illicit drug use/misuse and drug use... Read More

Automatic Detection of Intimate Partner Violence Victims
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Self-Report IPV on Twitter Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a preventable public health problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Approximately one in four women are estimated to be or have been victims of severe violence at some point in their lives, irrespective of age,... Read More

Generalizable NLP Framework for Migraine Reporting from Social Media
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Abstract Migraine is a highly prevalent and disabling neurological disorder. However, information about migraine management in real-world settings is limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported... Read More

Classification of Fall Types in Parkinson's Disease From Self-report Data Using NLP
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Introduction Falls can result from multiple types of biomechanical perturbations, including perturbations to an individual’s base of support (BoS; e.g., trips) or center of mass (CoM; e.g., overextension during bending) [1]. People with Parkinson;s disease are more likely to fall and be frequent fallers than... Read More

Few-shot Learning for Biomedical NER
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Few-shot learning (FSL) is a class of machine learning methods that require small numbers of labeled instances for training. With many medical topics having limited annotated text-based data in practical settings, FSL-based natural language processing (NLP) holds substantial promise. However, there is no current study... Read More

Trends in Substance-Induced Self-Harm
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Background In recent years, there has been a concerning increase in suicides and self-harm cases, both in the United States and across the world. In the United States, suicide rates have been steadily rising among different age groups and demographics. Globally, suicide rates also remain... Read More

Identification of Fontan Patients
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Background The Fontan operation palliates single ventricle heart defects and is associated with significant morbidity and premature mortality. Native anatomy varies; thus, Fontan cases cannot always be identified by International Classification of Diseases, Ninth and Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM) codes, making it... Read More

Identification of Transgender Patients
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Introduction Transgender people are a group of individuals whose gender identity and gender expression differ from their sex assigned at birth. The importance of transgender health research has gained increasing recognition in recent years with specific focus on mental health, cardiovascular diseases cancer, and other... Read More

Breast Cancer Research with Social Media Data
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This study proposes a natural language processing (NLP) architecture to detect breast cancer patients on Twitter based on their self-reports. By utilizing breast cancer related keywords and employing a machine learning classifier, the architecture achieves high accuracy in distinguishing firsthand self-reports of breast cancer, offering... Read More

COVID-19 and Social Media
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This page contains resources associated with multiple studies (completed and ongoing) focusing on COVID-19 Dashboards Research topics/studies: Syndromic surveillance: we are utilizing real-time social media data, natural language processing and machine learning methods to identify and track symptom distributions over time. Localized outbreak detection: we... Read More

Social Media Mining
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Social media is a source of massive amounts of information. Social media is accessible by large populations and it contains large amounts of health-related chatter posted by users themselves. Therefore, social media often contains health-related information that may not be available from any other sources.... Read More

Text Summarization For Medical Evidence
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A light-weight Text Summarization System for fast access to medical evidence. Overview As the volume of published medical research continues to grow rapidly, staying up to date with the best-available research evidence regarding specific topics is becoming an increasingly challenging problem for medical experts and... Read More