Identifying COVID-19 cases and extracting patient reported symptoms from Reddit using natural language processing.

We used social media data from "covid19positive" subreddit, from 03/2020 to 03/2022 to identify COVID-19 cases and extract their reported symptoms automatically using natural language processing (NLP). We trained a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers classification model with chunking to identify COVID-19 cases; also, we developed a novel QuadArm model, which incorporates Question-answering, dual-corpus expansion, Adaptive rotation clustering, and mapping, to extract symptoms. Our classification model achieved a 91.2% accuracy for the early period (03/2020-05/2020) and was applied to the Delta (07/2021-09/2021) and Omicron (12/2021-03/2022) periods for case identification. We identified 310, 8794, and 12,094 COVID-positive authors in the three periods, respectively. The top five common symptoms extracted in the early period were coughing (57%), fever (55%), loss of sense of smell (41%), headache (40%), and sore throat (40%). During the Delta period, these symptoms remained as the top five symptoms with percent authors reporting symptoms reduced to half or fewer than the early period. During the Omicron period, loss of sense of smell was reported less while sore throat was reported more. Our study demonstrated that NLP can be used to identify COVID-19 cases accurately and extracted symptoms efficiently.

When Patients Recover From COVID-19: Data-Driven Insights From Wearable Technologies.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is known as a contagious disease and caused an overwhelming of hospital resources worldwide. Therefore, deciding on hospitalizing COVID-19 patients or quarantining them at home becomes a crucial solution to manage an extremely big number of patients in a short time. This paper proposes a model which combines Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) and Deep Neural Network (DNN) to early and accurately classify disease stages of the patients to address the problem at a low cost. In this model, the LSTM component will exploit temporal features while the DNN component extracts attributed features to enhance the model's classification performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves substantially better prediction accuracy than existing state-of-art methods. Moreover, we explore the importance of different vital indicators to help patients and doctors identify the critical factors at different COVID-19 stages. Finally, we create case studies demonstrating the differences between severe and mild patients and show the signs of recovery from COVID-19 disease by extracting shape patterns based on temporal features of patients. In summary, by identifying the disease stages, this research will help patients understand their current disease situation. Furthermore, it will also help doctors to provide patients with an immediate treatment plan remotely that addresses their specific disease stages, thus optimizing their usage of limited medical resources.