Zaid Almubaid, Izzat Alsmadi, and Hisham Al-Mubaid
In recent years, people are becoming more dependent on the Internet as their main source of information about healthcare. A number of research projects in the past few decades examined and utilized the internet data for information extraction in healthcare including disease surveillance and monitoring. In this paper, we investigate and study the potential of internet data like internet search keywords and search query patterns in the healthcare domain for disease monitoring and detection. Specifically, we investigate search keyword patterns for disease outbreak detection. Accurate prediction and detection of disease outbreaks in a timely manner can have a big positive impact on the entire health care system. Our method utilizes machine learning in identifying interesting patterns related to the target disease outbreak from search keyword logs. We conducted experiments on the flu disease, which is the most searched disease in the interest of this problem. We showed examples of keywords that can be good predictors of outbreaks of the flu. Our method proved that the correlation between search queries and keyword trends is truly reliable in the sense that it can be used to predict the outbreak of the disease.
Comments
Fascinating and timely project — thank you for sharing this important work. —Jeanette Herman
This project is a foundation to further investigation on the topic of outbreak detection! Especially in the midst of the transition to technology in health care, the content has practical application. The research could potentially lead to prevention of future pandemics. —Sahar Elchehabi
This is a really interesting project. Are you or any of your collaborators looking at how GT data might correspond to outbreaks of the novel coronavirus? —Rob Reichle
Yes, this is ongoing research. We are continuously researching and considering new findings that impact/improve this research like the new coronavirus outbreak. As time goes by more and more information and details are generated and unfolding about the coronavirus almost on a daily and sometimes hourly rate. —Zaid Almubaid