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Contemporary attitudes and beliefs on coronary artery calcium from social media using artificial intelligence. NPJ digital medicine Somani, S., Balla, S., Peng, A. W., Dudum, R., Jain, S., Nasir, K., Maron, D. J., Hernandez-Boussard, T., Rodriguez, F. 2024; 7 (1): 83

Abstract

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) is a powerful tool to refine atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk assessment. Despite its growing interest, contemporary public attitudes around CAC are not well-described in literature and have important implications for shared decision-making around cardiovascular prevention. We used an artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline consisting of a semi-supervised natural language processing model and unsupervised machine learning techniques to analyze 5,606 CAC-related discussions on Reddit. A total of 91 discussion topics were identified and were classified into 14 overarching thematic groups. These included the strong impact of CAC on therapeutic decision-making, ongoing non-evidence-based use of CAC testing, and the patient perceived downsides of CAC testing (e.g., radiation risk). Sentiment analysis also revealed that most discussions had a neutral (49.5%) or negative (48.4%) sentiment. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of an AI-based approach to analyze large, publicly available social media data to generate insights into public perceptions about CAC, which may help guide strategies to improve shared decision-making around ASCVD management and public health interventions.

View details for DOI 10.1038/s41746-024-01077-w

View details for PubMedID 38555387

View details for PubMedCentralID PMC10981728