Depression is a global health concern. Social networks allow the affected population to share their experiences. These experiences, when mined, extracted, and analyzed, can be converted into either warnings to recall drugs (dangerous side effects), or service improvement (interventions, treatment options) based on observations derived from user behavior in depression-related social networks. Our aim was to develop a weighted network model to represent user activity on social health networks. This enabled us to accurately represent user interactions by relying on the data's semantic content. Our three-step method uses the weighted network model to represent user's activity, and network clustering and module analysis to characterize user interactions and extract further knowledge from user's posts. The network's topological properties reflect user activity such as posts' general topic as well as timing, while weighted edges reflect the posts semantic content and similarities among posts. The result, a synthesis from word data frequency, statistical analysis of module content, and the modeled health network's properties, has allowed us to gain insight into consumer sentiment of antidepressants. This approach will allow all parties to participate in improving future health solutions of patients suffering from depression.

Point-of-care (POC) diagnostics is playing an increasingly important role in public health, environmental monitoring, and food safety analysis. Smartphones, alone or in conjunction with add-on devices, have shown great capability of data collection, analysis, display, and transmission, making them popular in POC diagnostics. In this article, the state-of-the-art advances in smartphone-based POC diagnostic technologies and their applications in the past few years are outlined, ranging fromin vivotests that use smartphone's built-in/external sensors to detect biological signals toin vitrotests that involves complicated biochemical reactions. Novel techniques are illustrated by a number of attractive examples, followed by a brief discussion of the smartphone's role in telemedicine. The challenges and perspectives of smartphone-based POC diagnostics are also provided.

Intelligently extracting knowledge from social media has recently attracted great interest from the Biomedical and Health Informatics community to simultaneously improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs using consumer-generated opinion. We propose a two-step analysis framework that focuses on positive and negative sentiment, as well as the side effects of treatment, in users' forum posts, and identifies user communities (modules) and influential users for the purpose of ascertaining user opinion of cancer treatment. We used a self-organizing map to analyze word frequency data derived from users' forum posts. We then introduced a novel network-based approach for modeling users' forum interactions and employed a network partitioning method based on optimizing a stability quality measure. This allowed us to determine consumer opinion and identify influential users within the retrieved modules using information derived from both word-frequency data and network-based properties. Our approach can expand research into intelligently mining social media data for consumer opinion of various treatments to provide rapid, up-to-date information for the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals, and medical staff, on the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of future treatments.

A novel data mining method was developed to gauge the experience of the drug Sitagliptin (trade name Januvia) by patients with diabetes mellitus type 2. To this goal, we devised a two-step analysis framework. Initial exploratory analysis using self-organizing maps was performed to determine structures based on user opinions among the forum posts. The results were a compilation of user's clusters and their correlated (positive or negative) opinion of the drug. Subsequent modeling using network analysis methods was used to determine influential users among the forum members. These findings can open new avenues of research into rapid data collection, feedback, and analysis that can enable improved outcomes and solutions for public health and important feedback for the manufacturer.