Chiara Zucco

University Magna Græcia of Catanzaro, Italy

Chiara Zucco is a junior research scientist at the University Magna Græcia of Catanzaro, Italy. Her research interests are mainly focused on in- terpretable Text and Data Mining techniques and their application for patients monitoring and adverse events prediction

Text mining application in medicine

Textual data generated in healthcare contexts, including electronic health records, clinical notes, patient questionnaires, and research publications, provide rich, unstructured information that, when effectively mined, can signif- icantly enhance disease diagnosis, treatment planning, improve patient care by revealing intricate patterns as well as correlations not readily apparent through traditional data analysis methods.

In this invited talk, the fundamental tasks of text mining will be briefly introduced, with a particular focus on sentiment analysis, which examines the emotions and opinions expressed in textual data. In addition, an overview of various clinical applications of text mining will be presented, ranging from the analysis of hospital reviews extracted from an Italian blog to narrative medicine, which involves the written experiences of patients and their illnesses. Finally, the talk will also discuss how these techniques have been employed in telemedicine to improve remote patient monitoring by taking advantage of open-ended ques- tionnaires to predict low adherence to treatments for chronic diseases and to help clinicians understand the reasons behind it.