Perceptions in 3.6 Million Web-Based Posts of Online Communities on the Use of Cancer Immunotherapy: Data Mining Using BERTopic.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Immunotherapy has become a game changer in cancer treatment. The internet has been used by patients as a platform to share personal experiences and seek medical guidance. Despite the increased utilization of immunotherapy in clinical practice, few studies have investigated the perceptions about its use by analyzing social media data.

Objective

This study aims to use BERTopic (a topic modeling technique that is an extension of the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers machine learning model) to explore the perceptions of online cancer communities regarding immunotherapy.

Methods

A total of 4.9 million posts were extracted from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 16 online cancer-related forums. The textual data were preprocessed by natural langua

SUBMITTER: Wu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11851037 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature