Colloquium Computer Science - Mario Cannataro, University Magna Græcia of Catanzaro

Title: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining in Medicine

Abstract:

Textual documents generated in medicine, such as clinical reports and electronic health records, are more and more used in the biomedical research to extract knowledge that will complement and integrate the knowledge extracted from molecular (e.g. omics data) and clinical data (e.g. lab values, bioseignals and bioimages).

On the other hand, textual documents generated by patients, family members, and health operators through blogs, social networks, and questionnaires, that form the so-called Narrative Medicine field, are used to extract patients opinions and sentiments about their healthcare experience, or health professional experience and sentiment, that can be used to improve the healthcare processes or can be integrated and correlated with medical knowledge about diseases.

Main technologies to mine such textual data include Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Mining, Sentiment Analysis and Affective Computing.

The talk briefly recalls such computer science methods and presents some case studies including sentiment analysis of questionnaires in a tele-homecare program, polarity detection in patients blogs, and topic extraction from narrations of Long Covid patients.

Short Bio:

Mario Cannataro is a full professor of computer engineering and the director of the Data Analytics research center at the University "Magna Græcia" of Catanzaro, Italy. His current research interests include bioinformatics, health informatics, artificial intelligence, data mining, parallel computing. He has published 6 books and more than 300 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. Mario Cannataro is Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology 2nd Ed., and Associate Editor of Briefings in Bioinformatics and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics journals. He is a Senior Member of ACM, ACM SIGBio, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, BITS (Bioinformatics Italian Society) and SIBIM (Italian Society of Biomedical Informatics). He regularly co-organizes international workshops on bioinformatics and high- performance computing in primary conferences such as ACM-BCB, IEEE- BIBM and ICCS.