arXiv subjects

Hansi Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Hansi Zhang.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

When Text Simplification Is Not Enough: Could a Graph-Based Visualization Facilitate Consumers' Comprehension of Dietary Supplement Information?

Dietary supplements are widely used but not always safe. With the rapid development of the Internet, consumers usually seek health information including dietary supplement information online. To help consumers access quality online dietary supplement information, we have identified trustworthy dietary supplement information sources and built an evidence-based knowledge base of dietary supplement information-the integrated DIetary Supplement Knowledge base (iDISK) that integrates and standardizes dietary supplement related information across these different sources. However, as information in iDISK was collected from scientific sources, the complex medical jargon is a barrier for consumers' comprehension. To assess how different approaches to simplify and represent dietary supplement information from iDISK will affect lay consumers' comprehension, using a crowdsourcing platform, we recruited participants to read dietary supplement information in four different representations from iDISK: original text, syntactic and lexical text simplification, manual text simplification, and a graph-based visualization. We then assessed how the different simplification and representation strategies affected consumers' comprehension of dietary supplement information in terms of accuracy and response time to a set of comprehension questions. With responses from 690 qualified participants, our experiments confirmed that the manual approach had the best performance for both accuracy and response time to the comprehension questions, while the graph-based approach ranked the second outperforming other representations. In some cases, the graph-based representation outperformed the manual approach in terms of response time. A hybrid approach that combines text and graph-based representations might be needed to accommodate consumers' different information needs and information seeking behavior.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2019

Mining Twitter to Assess the Determinants of Health Behavior towards Human Papillomavirus Vaccination in the United States

Objectives To test the feasibility of using Twitter data to assess determinants of consumers' health behavior towards Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination informed by the Integrated Behavior Model (IBM). Methods We used three Twitter datasets spanning from 2014 to 2018. We preprocessed and geocoded the tweets, and then built a rule-based model that classified each tweet into either promotional information or consumers' discussions. We applied topic modeling to discover major themes, and subsequently explored the associations between the topics learned from consumers' discussions and the responses of HPV-related questions in the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS). Results We collected 2,846,495 tweets and analyzed 335,681 geocoded tweets. Through topic modeling, we identified 122 high-quality topics. The most discussed consumer topic is "cervical cancer screening"; while in promotional tweets, the most popular topic is to increase awareness of "HPV causes cancer". 87 out of the 122 topics are correlated between promotional information and consumers' discussions. Guided by IBM, we examined the alignment between our Twitter findings and the results obtained from HINTS. 35 topics can be mapped to HINTS questions by keywords, 112 topics can be mapped to IBM constructs, and 45 topics have statistically significant correlations with HINTS responses in terms of geographic distributions. Conclusion Not only mining Twitter to assess consumers' health behaviors can obtain results comparable to surveys but can yield additional insights via a theory-driven approach. Limitations exist, nevertheless, these encouraging results impel us to develop innovative ways of leveraging social media in the changing health communication landscape.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Assessing the Validity of a a priori Patient-Trial Generalizability Score using Real-world Data from a Large Clinical Data Research Network: A Colorectal Cancer Clinical Trial Case Study

Existing trials had not taken enough consideration of their population representativeness, which can lower the effectiveness when the treatment is applied in real-world clinical practice. We analyzed the eligibility criteria of Bevacizumab colorectal cancer treatment trials, assessed their a priori generalizability, and examined how it affects patient outcomes when applied in real-world clinical settings. To do so, we extracted patient-level data from a large collection of electronic health records (EHRs) from the OneFlorida consortium. We built a zero-inflated negative binomial model using a composite patient-trial generalizability (cPTG) score to predict patients clinical outcomes (i.e., number of serious adverse events, (SAEs)). Our study results provide a body of evidence that 1) the cPTG scores can predict patient outcomes; and 2) patients who are more similar to the study population in the trials that were used to develop the treatment will have a significantly lower possibility to experience serious adverse events.

stat.AP↗