A probabilistic semantic analysis of eHealth scientific literature

IntroductioneHealth emerged as an interdisciplinary research area about 70 years ago. This study employs probabilistic techniques to semantically analyse scientific literature related to the field of eHealth in order to identify topics and trends and discuss their comparative evolution.MethodsAuthors collected titles and abstracts of published literature on eHealth as indexed in PubMed. Basic statistical and bibliometric techniques were applied to overall describe the collected corpus; Latent Dirichlet Allocation was employed for unsupervised topics identification; topics trends analysis was performed, and correlation graphs were plotted were relevant.ResultsA total of 30,425 records on eHealth were retrieved from PubMed (all records till 31 December 2017, search on 8 May 2018) and 23,988 of these were included to the study corpus. eHealth domain shows a growth higher than the growth of the entire PubMed corpus, with a mean increase of eHealth corpus proportion of about 7% per year for the last 20 years. ...