Online forums may positively impact how patients cope with health conditions, empowering patients to take an active role in their health management. Some of the patients are looking for informative assistance, others are seeking emotional support. Thus, the classification of the posts’ content to emotional vs. informative may assist in the effective management of the forums, saving resources, and providing needed assistance to the patients.

Dr. Pavel Goldstein and Dr. Roni Elran-Barak are analyzing the content of medical forums, developing and validating a novel computational tool for the classification of the patients’ post to emotional or informative employing approaches of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning.