CDI-Type I: Collaborative Research: Gaining Knowledge from Other Patients: Structuring and Searching the content of Health-Related Web Posts

慢性病患者越来越多地依赖在线论坛、博客和邮件列表来交流信息、实用技巧和关于他们病情的故事，并从同龄人那里获得情感支持。虽然这种类型的社交网络已经成为许多患者日常生活和决策过程的核心，但对其所传达内容的质量以及其在医学和公共卫生领域的使用和影响的研究却很少。在患者方面，论坛的技术水平令人惊讶地低下：用户通常别无选择，只能在寻找特定信息时浏览大量帖子。缺乏适当的工具来组织、分析和最终理解大量与健康相关的、患者撰写的帖子，这阻碍了研究人员调查这一媒介，也阻碍了患者充分利用这一媒介。该项目旨在通过创建在患者论坛中搜索信息的工具，帮助患者和保健专业人员访问在线患者撰写的信息。拟议的工作跨越几个领域：自然语言处理、数据管理、信息检索、公共卫生和行为医学，它将为理解通过在线论坛和邮件列表提供的同行患者帖子奠定基础。该建议旨在将以患者为中心的资源的信息处理和医学理解结合起来。该项目的工作将处理来自新兴媒体的文本，直接解决患者的直接关切。作为该项目的一部分设计的工具将使研究在线患者行为和信息需求的研究人员受益。这些工具，如帖子的智能搜索引擎，也将提高患者本身的体验，他们是这种媒体的狂热用户。除了研究议程之外，本提案还提出了一个教育计划，该计划与弥合计算机科学研究人员与医学领域研究人员之间的差距这一总体目标相一致。特别地，课程介绍了在公共卫生和医学领域重要的研究问题背景下的智能信息处理方法。

Individuals with chronic diseases rely more and more on online forums, blogs, and mailing lists to exchange information, practical tips, and stories about their conditions and to get emotional support from their peers. While this type of social networking has become central to the daily lives and decision-making processes of many patients, there has been little research on the quality of the content it conveys, as well as its use and impact in the fields of medicine and public health. On the patients' side, forums are surprisingly technologically poor: users have often no choice but to browse through massive numbers of posts while looking for a particular piece of information. The lack of appropriate tools to organize, analyze and ultimately understand the overwhelming number of health-related, patient-written posts hinders researchers from investigating this medium and hinders patients from using this medium to its full potential. This project aims at helping both patients and health professionals access online patient-authored information by creating tools to search for information in patient forums. The proposed work spans several fields: natural language processing, data management, information retrieval, public health and behavioral medicine, and it will build the foundations for understanding peer patient posts available through online forums and mailing lists.This proposal aims at bringing together information processing and medical understanding of patient-centric resources. The work in this project will process texts from an emerging medium, which directly addresses the immediate concerns of patients. The tools designed as part of this project will benefit the researchers who study the behaviors and information needs of patients online. These tools, such as the intelligent search engine for posts, will also enhance the experience of the patients themselves, who are avid users of this medium. In addition to the research agenda, this proposal presents an education plan consistent with the overall goal of bridging the gap between researchers in computer science and researchers in medical fields. In particular, a course is presented that introduces methods of intelligent information processing in the context of research questions important to the fields of public health and medicine.