Sunday, October 19, 2025

Health-Related Hot Topic Detection in Online Communities Using Text Clustering

Authors: Yingjie Lu, Pengzhu Zhang, Jingfang Liu, Jia Li, Shasha Deng

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056221

Abstract Summary

New research reveals that online health communities discuss five main hot topics: symptoms, examinations, drugs, procedures, and complications. By using advanced document clustering with medical-specific features, researchers analyzed lung cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes forums, finding distinct discussion patterns across different disease types.

Why Brain? 🧠

Researchers developed an automated text clustering method to identify trending health topics in online communities by analyzing patient discussions about lung cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes, revealing that patients focus on five main areas: symptoms, examinations, drugs, procedures, and complications, with significant differences between disease types.

The image is AI-generated for illustrative purposes only. Courtesy of Midjourney.

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