{"id":5863,"date":"2016-04-13T06:00:58","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/?p=5863"},"modified":"2017-02-07T14:33:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T22:33:45","slug":"crowdsourced-health-how-big-data-can-enhance-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/crowdsourced-health-how-big-data-can-enhance-medical-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourced health: How big data can enhance medical research"},"content":{"rendered":"

By George Thomas Jr., Writer, Microsoft<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason \u201cflu season\u201d has earned its miserable prominence: When the flu is severe, it\u2019s difficult to avoid.<\/p>\n

And if you\u2019re a parent you know this all too well, since children play a key role in influenza (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> transmission.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why, in 2013, health officials in the United Kingdom selected children in seven cities across England for an experiment on the effectiveness of flu vaccines (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

But when they tried to test the success of this campaign, they faced one critical hurdle: The flu season was not considered severe enough to provide definitive test results.<\/p>\n

Or so they thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat they were counting was how many people were hospitalized or visited the doctor,\u201d Microsoft principal researcher Elad Yom-Tov<\/a> said. \u201cBut very few people who have the flu ever bother to see a doctor. Usually when you get the flu you stay at home a few days and that\u2019s that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Yom-Tov and his colleagues at University College London (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> looked at flu-related searches on Bing (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, along with how many people complained about the flu on Twitter.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on these data sources alone, we were able to show a 25 to 30 percent reduction in the number of flu cases in cities where the vaccine was distributed, compared to other cities where it was not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"Elad<\/p>\n

In his new book, Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine<\/em> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Yom-Tov, a principal researcher based in Microsoft\u2019s New England lab<\/a>, shows how the Internet\u2019s trove of data on how we research our own health can itself be mined for answers medical researchers otherwise have no way of getting.<\/p>\n

To protect users\u2019 privacy<\/a>, Yom-Tov used rigorous safeguards, such as examining data that had been anonymized and aggregated.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven when pulling data from Twitter, we\u2019re not identifying any of the people individually \u2014 we don\u2019t care who they are,\u201d Yom-Tov said of the flu study. \u201dAll we care about is how many people have the flu in those seven cities where the vaccine was used, compared to other cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

He applied the same data mining approach to try to get a better understanding of the side effects of prescription drugs (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yom-Tov, in collaboration with Evgeniy Gabrilovich (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, analyzed search engine logs for associations between drugs and their possible side effects, and they discovered some side effects were being overlooked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were missing side effects people don\u2019t realize are connected to the drugs because they\u2019re more benign or take a longer time to appear,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is due to the fact that traditional methods rely on people reporting such associations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yom-Tov said this deep data dive is the best way to detect such side effects. And it can be done without compromising user privacy because the data is sourced from very large populations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not asking if John Smith asked about this drug or this side effect,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we\u2019re asking is how many people asked about this side effect after asking about this drug?\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Yom-Tov acknowledges Internet data does not hold all the answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s worth saying that these data are not the magic bullet \u2014 they won’t replace traditional ways of doing medical research.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yom-Tov\u2019s hope is that the medical community will start collaborating more closely with computer scientists and think of Internet data as another source of information for their research\u2014especially for data that\u2019s difficult or impossible to get in another way.<\/p>\n

Although Internet search data<\/a> can be a valuable source of data for medical researchers, Yom-Tov also cautioned that much of the medical information published online \u201cis not of the highest quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recommends that people rely on trustworthy sources like the Mayo Clinic (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, government organizations, and websites certified by the Health on the Net Foundation (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, which promotes useful and reliable online health information.<\/p>\n

\u201cBe careful about what kind of authority you attribute to the sources of information you find online,\u201d he said, noting it is a topic of upcoming research.<\/p>\n

Learn more<\/strong><\/p>\n