Patient-centered and experience-aware mining for effective adverse drug reaction discovery in online health forums

Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) have become a serious health problem and even a leading cause of death in the United States. Pre-marketing clinical trials and traditional post-marketing surveillance using voluntary and spontaneous report systems are insufficient for ADR detection. On the other hand, online health forums provide valuable evidences in a large scale and in a timely fashion through the active participation of patients, caregivers, and doctors. In this article, we present patient-centered and experience-aware mining framework for effective ADR discovery using online health forum data. Our experimental evaluation with both an official ADR knowledge base and human-annotated ground truth verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method for ADR discovery.