The social web has been an increasingly fertile territory for understanding society and the way we interact with one another.  Nowhere has this been more so than in healthcare, with various projects attempting to mine social data to track flu and other diseases at an early stage.

A recent project has emerged that attempts to make our interactions with medicines much more effective.  Researchers have developed a tool, which they document in a recently published paper, that scours Twitter for mentions of various drugs and medicines, before then creating a map of connectivity between them.

“Our new algorithm is a great way to make discoveries that can be followed-up and tested by experts like clinical researchers and pharmacists,” the authors say.

“We may not know what the interaction is, but with this approach we can quickly find clear evidence of drugs that are linked together via hashtags,” they continue.

The authors believe that the service could be used to alert the public of potential risks, even before the authorities have taken any official measures.

They also believe that the tool will help to overcome the issue of studies being published not due to new scientific findings but rather because of insufficient and infrequent tagging of previous studies in digital libraries.

The project team have created a website that will allow investigators to explore connections between a drug, the existing scientific database on PubMed and content found on Twitter.

The role of hashtags

The research team focus specifically on information contained within hashtags to try and discover new associations.

“Each individual hashtag functions almost like a neuron in the human brain, sending a specific signal,” they say, with the hope being that it will uncover previously unknown connections between drugs.

They created a map of links existing between hashtags and keywords, before then weeding out junk data to get to the real meat of the conversations.  An algorithm then searched for the shortest path between a pair of search terms and their relevant hashtag.

Peer review of medicine

It’s trends like this that saw the creation of Iodine last year.  It’s designed as a kind of Yelp but for medications.  It provides a searchable database of over 100,000 consumer reviews of all manner of drugs, with each review filtered by age and gender.

The site utilizes natural language processing to allow reviews to be searched effectively, and to allow a drug reaction profile to be placed on top of bespoke tips from medical experts.

Of course, Iodine aren’t mining social networks, but they are nonetheless taking advantage of many of the same approaches that tap into the wisdom of the crowd to ensure medicine becomes smarter.