The American Society of medical Oncology lately made public close to all the abstracts — more than 5,000 pieces of research — that have been selected for the ASCO annual meeting, which kicked off in Chicago on the last day of could.
Sifting by way of these 5,000 abstracts could be an practically inhuman assignment: every abstract involves 2,000 characters. That’s 10 million characters of know-how about oncology created by way of specialists that’s now available for the general public to parse.
However as high-quality as the ASCO summary drop is, that research just isn't the only overwhelming trove of communique on cancer created by way of medical professionals. One ASCO abstract (founded on research by using me and W2O colleagues Greg Matthews and Kayla Rodriguez) tells story of how, over the path of 2013, U.S. Doctors tweeted about melanoma eighty two,383 times. At one hundred forty characters a tweet, that’s nearly 12 million characters.
We know there were 82,383 tweets given that we counted them. Utilising our MDigitalLife database, which works Twitter handles with proven profiles from the government’s health care provider database, we scanned all tweets with the aid of doctors for mentions of dozens of key words associated with cancer over the direction of calendar yr 2013.
Asco 2014 hashtags
Now, we haven’t learn all the tweets, a mission (from a phrase-depend factor of view) that will be equivalent to sprucing off the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then devouring battle and Peace. But we’ve regarded largely at who was talking on Twitter, what they have been speaking about, and once they were speaking.
Relating to the themes covered, the headline was once pretty clear: breast cancer remains king. About 26 percentage of all health care professional tweets about cancer dealt with breast melanoma, a determine that virtually equaled the combined dialogue of lung melanoma, colon melanoma, prostate melanoma and lymphoma — the #1, #2, #four and #5 melanoma killers.
This fits what we determined final 12 months in the Social Oncology project, which checked out all public digital conversations — general practitioner and otherwise — and discovered that breast cancer had outsized have an impact on.
That’s now not totally shocking — the a lot larger public conversation about melanoma is similarly disproportionate — but it does mirror the best way that the conversation among authorities tracks the broader dialog. Even as it’s no shock that tweets about melanoma from physicians spike in the course of the ASCO assembly, it’s not totally intuitive that consciousness months can be a key draw for physicians.
Even among these 80,000-plus tweets, you can find a transparent spike for breast melanoma recognition month. And it’s now not simply BCAM. Every day prostate melanoma tweets from physicians leap through just about 30 percentage in September, throughout prostate cancer recognition month.
Those are the wide strokes, and, if the devil is in the small print, there are a fine many devils luring in eighty two,383 mini-missives. The phrase “rate” comes up a pair hundred instances. “cost” is acknowledged virtually 1,600 instances. “luxurious” plays a function in one hundred fifty or so tweets. Now we have a lot of work to do in working out these ideas (and others), nevertheless it’s clear that it'll make for interesting supply material.
To be sure, Twitter will not be a crystal ball. The a hundred and forty-character limit indisputably scares some docs away, and it strips from others the ability to make nuanced arguments. There’s a purpose that scientific journals don’t submit on Twitter and why the food and Drug Administration seems to take a dim view of advertising in a personality-depend world.
Nonetheless, there are treasures to be dug up in 1,000,000-word trove of tweets, created by way of 4,000 diverse experts, and we’re excited to have the opportunity.
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