Humane Visual AI: Telling the Stories Behind a Medical Condition

Wonyoung So, Edyta Paulina Bogucka, Sanja Scepanovic, Sagar Joglekar, Ke Zhou, Daniele Quercia

Abstract: A biological understanding is key for managing medical conditions, yet psychological and social aspects matter too. The main problem is that these two aspects are hard to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">quantify</i> and inherently difficult to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">communicate</i> . To <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">quantify</i> psychological aspects, this work mined around half a million Reddit posts in the sub-communities specialised in 14 medical conditions, and it did so with a new deep-learning framework. In so doing, it was able to associate mentions of medical conditions with those of emotions. To then <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">quantify</i> social aspects, this work designed a probabilistic approach that mines open prescription data from the National Health Service in England to compute the prevalence of drug prescriptions, and to relate such a prevalence to census data. To finally <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">visually communicate</i> each medical condition's biological, psychological, and social aspects through storytelling, we designed a narrative-style layered Martini Glass visualization. In a user study involving 52 participants, after interacting with our visualization, a considerable number of them changed their mind on previously held opinions: 10% gave more importance to the psychological aspects of medical conditions, and 27% were more favourable to the use of social media data in healthcare, suggesting the importance of persuasive elements in interactive visualizations.