A cost-effective, case-control study on the association between breast cancer and pregnancy through web mining

Hong Jun Yoon, Songhua Xu, Georgia Tourassi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We report a case-control epidemiological study through mining people's stories from the Internet. Our overarching goal is to test whether mining openly available, personal stories from the Internet is a cost-effective way for reliable epidemiological discoveries. As a case study, we focus on the association between breast cancer risk and pregnancy, which is clearly established through controlled clinical survey studies. Specifically, we automatically collected and mined 30,000 online obituary articles via a series of tailored cyber-informatics tools we developed. Replicating a case-control study design, we analyzed the collected data confirming with statistical significance that parity is associated with lower breast cancer risk. Our web mining study demonstrates promising preliminary evidence that online content mining can be a cost-effective and reliable way for epidemiological knowledge discovery.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2013 4th Annual ORNL Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Conference
Subtitle of host publicationCollaborative Biomedical Innovations, BSEC 2013
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event2013 4th Annual ORNL Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Conference: Collaborative Biomedical Innovations, BSEC 2013 - Oak Ridge, TN, United States
Duration: May 21 2013May 23 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2013 4th Annual ORNL Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Conference: Collaborative Biomedical Innovations, BSEC 2013

Other

Other2013 4th Annual ORNL Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Conference: Collaborative Biomedical Innovations, BSEC 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOak Ridge, TN
Period5/21/135/23/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Biomedical Engineering

Keywords

  • breast cancer
  • case-control study
  • epidemiology
  • obituary
  • web mining

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